do not think of a blue elephant

Back with a bang and a crash

2006-08-03T00:10:00.000+13:00

So I'm back home in the land of Blighty, I slipped back into British culture like a comfortable pair of shoes, aided by decent cups of tea and HP sauce (a mixed metaphor that's probably now conjuring images of worn shoes filled with tea and brown sauce). The adventures of a month ago now seem like a distant hazy dream, one that you can remember as having been really good but with details that become more shrouded as time passes. I can still feel that a change has occurred however, a new sense of purpose and focus that was lacking when I left has definitely become apparent on my return, I've just got to keep that feeling now and not lose the ground I've covered.

I've dropped back into the routine of work quite smoothly, it does help working for a company I like with people I like, though finding somewhere to live didn't prove to be as easy. Looking around at the shoe boxes that people have the audacity to call flats and seeing the money people are willing to charge (and presumably pay) for them I realized how lucky I was to have lived at my previous address.

I had thought I'd found somewhere but after contracts had been signed and money exchanged it became apparent that I'd actually agreed to live in a war zone. A longstanding disagreement between my landlord and the resident of the flat downstairs, that I found out from the police stretched back over a year, cumulated (at the end of a week of smashed windows and police) in a brick being put through the window of the property I was renting. I left there pretty sharpish (though my girlfriend did point out that after Malaysia why should I be bothered about a few bricks and some broken glass?) and moved back to mum and dad's (thankfully I had that option otherwise I'd have been royally fucked). I've since got my money back from the landlord (though only after threatening legal action) and have now found another (quieter) flat that I can move into at the end of the month.

As others have pointed out, you travel the world and do crazy stuff with no problems only to come back and get into trouble on your own doorstep. But the bad shit exists to make the good shit seem good, Yin and Yang you can't get one without the other and there has been much more joy on my return than sorrow.

I think also I came back with the expectation that I would be just able to pick up where I had left off, which is the wrong attitude to have. This is a brave new world now and I'm going to have to work hard to build on the foundations laid in Malaysia, I think a bit of adversity is a welcome slap in the face to remind me that life is a struggle and if it wasn't it wouldn't be half so interesting.

Blind, mentally Handicapped, Freedom Fighters and foreign Visitors

2006-06-18T21:08:00.000+13:00

So says the sign over one of the ticket booths in Agra Fort railway station. I had visions of a turbaned man in a kaftan, Kalashnikov slung casually over one shoulder, being asked if he wanted an aircon carriage into Pakistan, but unfortunately there were no obvious freedom fighters around while I waited for my ticket.

India is a mad, mad place. It's a world of stark contrasts, grinding poverty and stark beauty, somewhere you cannot prepare yourself for you just have to experience.

Since changing my plans in Mumbai I have been following the footsteps of the Islamic Moghul Empire, taking in the forts and palaces they left behind dotted across Rajastan. As I've traveled across the country I've been plowing through the last two books of Neal Stephensons Barorque Cycle, a trilogy of Novels set in the late 17th and early 18th century, and in one of those bizarre synchronous events that occur when you're traveling I opened the book to find one of the characters entering Rajastan on horseback just as I was crossing the border on the train. What struck me as I compared the world conjured by this historical fiction to the one I was experiencing was how little had actually changed, sure there's electricity, combustion engines and the like but as you stand outside one of the immense sandstone forts or Mosques that signified the moguls rein and look at the Bazaars and hawkers crowding outside you are struck by the fact that a Shah standing on the battlements a few hundred years ago would have seen much the same thing.

Most towns outside cities consist of rude thrown together dwellings which acrete coral like into any available space, connected by dirt tracks that occasionally grow a thin strip of concrete chewed in at the sides like an apple core. Piles of rubbish abound and most days you'll run across several mounds of human shit (if you catch a train anywhere early in the morning you'll pass at least fifty people squatting on waste ground or perched on train tracks performing their morning constitutional). The Infrastructure in most places is pretty fucked, buses and trains are falling to pieces and filthy (though they still manage to run on time, British rail take note), power goes out regularly and large numbers still get their water from hand pumped wells. It's something I've always known about India, but until you actually see it (and in a lot of cases smell it) you really get an idea of how molly coddled and sanitized we've become in the UK.

But still there is plenty of happiness here and the people are, in most cases very friendly and proud of their country, though I've found that there is such a massive gulf between the respective wealth of our two cultures as to form an insurmountable barrier. In the end you have to accept that you will always be seen through the distorting lens of the exchange rate and in a country of 1,027,015,247 souls all trying to grab their little bit of the action then those who shout the loudest are the ones who survive.

My hair seems to be a big hit :-), I can't go three paces at any monument without someone running over shouting "Sir! Sir! Your hair!" and demanding to have their picture taken with me. My confused and smiling face must now appear in countless photo albums across India "And here's a random foreigner we met at the Taj Mahal, look at his hair!"

I'm finishing my journey in Delhi now, staying in the Pharagange, a narrow corridor packed to bursting with hastily stacked dwellings, shops, restaurants, guest houses and hostels. Every available space is filled with something and walking through it one is bombarded to sensory overload. I've been here a few days now and everytime I leave my guest house I have to spend at least 15mins trying to find it on my return (and the roads a bloody straight line so it's not as if I can take a wrong turn).

I like Delhi, more so than Mumbai. The hassle you get here is surprisingly less than everywhere else, possibly because there is more business to be had so rickshaw drivers tend to leave you alone after the 5th no (though not before trying to sell you some hash). I've had a few people try and run scams but once you give them back their spiel word for word before they say it they tend to leave you alone (there must be a training college for them somewhere because they all say the same thing).

Anyway the adventure is almost over, I fly home in a few days and then it's back to normality (well in my own relative sense that is). I'm looking forward to getting back seeing my family, my friends and my girl. I've already put in my request, the first thing I want when I get home is to go down the local cafe for a fry up, a fry up with brown sauce, mmmmm. Funny the little things you're mind latches onto when you're away from the familiarity of your own culture.

Welcome to India

2006-06-02T21:28:00.000+13:00

So Malaysia is now far behind me and I've hit the home leg of my journey through India. Even after spending 3 months outside of England India is still a shock to the system, if Malaysia was a foriegn country then India is another planet.

I've began my journey in Mumbai (formally Bombay) the largest city on India's west coast. It's an insane place, a city of juxtaposistions, hastely constructed shanties vie with the stone edifces of the former Raj and overly dressed security guards sit with glassey stares outside plush department stores while a few feet away a beggers in flithy rags squat on bits of cardboard.

It's also not a city you can become anonymous in. As a 6ft 2in white bloke with shoulder length hair, when you're striding around the city you're like a black hole dragging every, merchant, begger, drug dealer and cab driver in the vacinity towards you with the inescapable attraction of the exchange rate. In the 3 days I've been here I've had 4 people ask me to be in a Bollywood movie, countless people try and sell me dope, kids and beggers follow me with for streets at a time, taxi drivers make up prices at the drop of a hat, and every stall holder under the sun try to entice me with their riches.

It is I admit quite draining walking around fending off the advances of all and sundry. But the people are generally friendly and cheerful, even when they're trying to rip you off, and as long as you keep a sense of humour about it it's not so bad but still it's nice to be able to retreat to a hotel room, shut out the hustle and bustle and recharge before another sortee.

My plans have changed again since I arrived, Monsoon has come early (in fact the day I arrived) and Mumbai is awash with a constant stream of water from the heavens. Checking around down south it seems the weather is just as bad down there, I had thought about going to Goa anyway to see what it was like but a string of bad luck around buying my train ticket (that cumulated in a frantic couple of hours where I thought I'd lost my passport) convinced me the universe didn't want me to go south.

Instead I've decided to head up north away from the rain, my train leaves tonight for Jaipur where there's a spectacular red sandstone hill fort perched above the city, from there I figure I'm going to head into the Thar desert for some camel treking then work my way to Delhi and check out the Taj Mahal and surrounding area.

So no beaches just plenty of sand, still that's what I love about traveling, everything can change at the drop of a hat and as long as you relax and follow the flow things generally turn out as they should.

End of the beginning

2006-05-23T22:19:00.000+13:00

So it's been a fucking mad 3 months, I've been punched, kicked and thrown into walls. Had rocks thrown at me and been set on fire. I've ached all over, had bruised shins and swollen ankles and I think I may have fractured a toe last week (I dunno it still hurts like a bugger). I've climbed magic mountains and meditated in sufi tombs. And last but by no means least I've sweated, a lot.

So after all that was it worth it? Fuck yeah, I'd do it again in a heartbeat, it has been a truly life changing experience and I'm going home leaner, meaner and with more information than you can shake a stick at :-).

Thanks go to Zianal for torturing me the last few months and sharing a small amount of his massive knowledge with me but mostly to Nigel, who has put up with my annoyingly cheerful face darkening his doorstep almost every morning, has graciously opened many doors and allowed me to steal a small amount of his chi, giving me enough material to keep me occupied for a lifetime.

Thanks also go to Fong who has fed and watered me, given me lifts all over the place and been very gracious about the lanky foreigner sweating all over her nice living room floor while she's trying to watch her Korean soap operas. And finally thanks also to Lian and Min, just for being Lian and Min.

All I've got to do now is practice the stuff for the rest of my life....:-)

So next I'm off to India, I fly out Tuesday night and am currently planning to go South to Kerala (though this may change as I get there just in time for the monsoon...bugger). Well whatever happens I'm sure I'll have a few more things to post about.

Khatam vids

2006-05-18T22:11:00.000+13:00

Here are some clips of the Khatam (see earlier post) that a friend has kindly let me host on his server, enjoy.

don_adam_weapons.wmv (7163 kb)
adam_fight.wmv (6269 kb)
dons_fight.wmv (30,578)
stone_vs_fire.wmv (7513 kb)
fire_vs_flesh.wmv (6607 kb)
fire_walk.wmv (2081 kb)
washing_in_oil.wmv (3100 kb)

(Note I've fixed the links now so they should all be working)

Oh and I've taken the word checker thingy off the comments because people were complaining it wasn't working properly and stopped them posting. I've already had two lots of spam and some abuse so feel free to add to them. :-)

Training, training and more training

2006-05-18T21:43:00.000+13:00

Well things have been relatively quiet here for the last few weeks. I've mainly been drilling the stuff I've learnt over the last couple of months trying to etch everything into my synapses, make the most of my time before I start the long trek home via India and give Nigel and family a bit of a break from having the lanky foreigner jumping around the living room.

Pak Zianal also told me yesterday that I've completed the syllabus for the White Tiger Thai Boxing. This doesn't mean I've suddenly transformed into some martial arts master, rather I've now learnt all the basic drills, conditioning and forms, all I've got to do now is go and practice them for the rest of my life :-). It was quite interesting yesterday, I joined in training with some of his Malay students (something I haven't done for a while) and the difference between when I trained with them when I first got here to now was startling. All my techniques were much more solid and had a lot more power and my shins weren't killing me after 15mins of kicking, just shows you what a few months of beatings will do for a mans character.

On top of all the Silat and Thai boxing my form has improved no end with a lot of niggling problems if not ironed out at least in the process of being fixed and Nigels taught me a kick ass staff form that I've been dutifully practicing until my arms fall off, it's very nice and has lots of fa-jing training that's feeding back into my fast form which seems to be developing some oomph now.

I've got about a week left now, my little sister is in Malaysia (passing through on a leg of her own round the world jaunt) and she should hit Penang next week, so we should have time to meet up for a few days before I leave for India. I've got a place booked up in Mumbai for a couple of days and then the plan is to head down South and work my way back up (a slight change of plan than previous but more realistic I think).

I'll try and do another post before I leave, I've helping Nigel and Fong teach some kids martial arts at a local school on the weekend before I leave so that should be amusing.

Demo

2006-05-01T21:12:00.000+13:00

So you think after having rocks chucked at me and being almost set on fire I could handle anything, but this morning standing at the edge of a small stage dressed up again in my Malay gear (which I have to admit I find most comfortable) waiting to go out in front of an audience I could still feel that familiar dry throat and gurgling tummy.

Myself, Nigel, Fong (Nigel's wife) and Lien (Nigel's son) where all at the USM ABN-AMRO Arts and Cultural Centre in the centre of Penang performing a Silat Tari demo to help launch an art exhibition by a local artist Shamsul Bahari. One side of the small stage was crowded with the traditional instruments of a Gamalan Orchestra, metal bells and gongs hanging in beautifully crafted housings adorned with intricate carvings, the other half clear for us to jump around in.

It may sound odd that a group of Europeans should be out promoting Malay traditional arts to Malays, and I'm sure there is some novelty value in it, but as Pak Zianal says; when people see that someone is willing to travel half way round the world to immerse themselves in Malay local culture and arts it helps to make people realize how much it is worth.

Nigel took the stage first opening the proceedings with a Tari dance to the four directions while some of Pak Zianal's lads banged out a rhythm on the gongs and drums. As he finished the rest of us came on clutching small bowls of flowers, I passed Nigel his and Fong and Lien left the stage we began Silat Smarap. This is a dance, normally performed at weddings, where the participants each hold a bowl of flowers, one representing male and the other female (the female is distinguished from the male because she has the bigger bowl, which seems quite appropriate I think :-p).

The idea of the dance is that the male has to try catch and touch bowls with the female while the female has to simultaneously tease and avoid the male, so the female is characterized by her creativity in avoiding the male while the male is distinguished by his cunning, trying to corner the female and use feints and tricks to lure her out. Apart from being great fun, my nerves were soon forgotten as I chased Nigel around the stage grins on our faces (I was the male, much to Nigel's annoyance but he could do the feminine moves much better than me :-)), the dance is a fantastic footwork and sensitivity exercise as you attempt to trick, tease, corner and escape from each other and because it's a dance it's less likely degenerate into a forceful contest.

After Nigel had kindly conceded (otherwise I'd have been chasing him for hours) Fong and Lien took the stage and performed the same dance. One of the best things about Silat Tari is that it allows the exponent to bring him or herself to the picture from the beginning. Instead of having to conform to a set style, conditioned by set patterns of movement, the principles and basics allow the person to find his or her own way of moving. This means that when you watch a group perform Silat Tari, though it is obvious that each person is moving in a similar fashion, there is also a certain stamp or quality of movement that is unique to each individual. Therefore watching Fong and Lien do the dance was quite different to myself and Nigel, Fong moves with fluid grace and strength while Lien's movements have a focused intensity that you can feel across a room.

Once they had finished the dance we all took our turns to perform various Tari, empty handed and with weapons (Nigel used a Pedang, a Malay single edged sword, while I had my trusty stick and Lien had a Kris) , to finish myself and Nigel performed a 'skit' whereby Nigel played the aggressive 'hard' martial artist, terrifying both the audience and the band stamping and shouting (he hammed it up beautifully and the hardest part was keeping a straight face), and I was the soft and flowing Silat Tari guy deftly avoiding and countering his blows (obviously we' been rehearsing this before and Nigel kindly uttered a blood curdling scream every time he attacked). The skit ended with Nigel crawling off the stage and Lien coming on to defend his fallen father, by running up my leg and elbowing me in the head (he was kind to me today as yesterday he landed a beautiful knee right on my nose while practicing).

In all it seemed to go very well and both Pak Zianal and Nigel got positive feedback and seemed happy, which is the important thing on these occasions. Something that can be easy to forget coming from the West is the concept of Face, if you are performing a demo it's not just your own embarrassment you have to worry about if it goes wrong but that of your teacher and their lineage whose skill you are representing.

Once all the excitement was over we got to have a proper look round at the art exhibition, the artist was a Penang local who I think had lived overseas in the States and Japan before finally moving back to Penang. The art was really good, with a diversity in style ranging from pen and ink miniature's and cartoons to full size canvases of everything from abstract images to landscapes. The two particular things that caught my eye where a series of pictures of tropical fish, their dayglow colours against a stark black background that seemed to fix them in it's embrace and a large canvas filled with intertwining tree branches reaching up to surround/ensnare a white dove at the centre.

I'm glad that I had another opportunity to something out of the ordinary while out here but I'm also glad that the demo is over as these things are always nerve wracking, still it's good to get the chance to help in a small way to promote the local culture and art and hopefully give back something of what it has given me.

Khatam

2006-04-17T15:38:00.000+13:00

It's after eight in the evening but I'm still sweating as I sit cross legged on the floor of Pak Zianal's living room, I'm not sure if it's because I'm dressed in the heavy black cotton of my Silat uniform, complete with colorful Sarong and headdress, or because I'm nervous. People bustle around preparing for the evenings proceedings, the call to prayer from the nearby mosque lilts softly in the background and the smell of incense and burning wood wafts through the door. Next to me a my friend, Don, also from England and my senior in our Martial arts organization sits dressed in similar garb, I look across out the corner of my eye and wonder if he is feeling the same as me.

We are here for our Khatam, Khatam is an Arabic word that means 'last' or 'ending' it is also used to refer to the last prayers said at someone's death. In Malay martial arts it is the name of a ceremony that closes a students formal instruction in an art, where he or she must demonstrate that they can perform to a certain level in front of a group of their peers and instructors from other arts (who have the final say on whether or not a student has passed). This probably doesn't sound too bad until you realize that some of the tests on tonight's bill include fighting with some of the local students and going through certain 'ordeals' involving flames and lumps of rock.

Finally as the call to prayer fades to silence Pak Zianal calls us out to begin. We sit on the bare concrete at the front of his house in meditation while Nigel, my teacher, opens the proceedings with the Tari. Silat Tari is form of Silat most often associated with dancing and like Tai-Chi often misunderstood as lacking in any martial application. As Nigel moves gracefully through his free form dance, arms waving in front of him as he moves into a low stance, you could be forgiven for mistaking the moves as that of simple dancing. However a good Tari, one that follows all the principles, should be able to have a martial application for any move within the dance.

Once the proceedings are considered open we are moved to one corner of Pak Zianal's yard and the fun begins. One by one we have to go up and strut our stuff in front of Nigel (who is overseeing the proceedings) and a panel of other students and teachers. Myself and Don run through our Tari first empty handed and then with weapons (Don with a Kris and myself with a stick).

Next comes the sparring, in this form of Silat sparring you have to show that you can fight using the moves of the Tari. So though we are fighting without any protective padding it's as much about style as it is about content. My opponent, Arri, is one of Pak Zianal's Thai Boxing students and a guy that likes to fight, but surprisingly I'm feeling very calm. We leap around the yard exchanging blows and weaving the patterns of Silat moves with our hands and feet, he's very fast and tough executing some crippling kicks at my legs and body but I think I give as good as I get. After two rounds of frenetic action we are called to stop, both of us grinning and panting, blood coursing through our veins, each of us disappointed we had to stop.

Don's fight is almost the opposite of mine, while mine was a flurry of blows Don's and his opponents Fayiz is one of patience and strategy. We find out later that Fayiz is a regional champion in competition Silat and at almost got on the team to represent Malaysia in the South East Asian games, he moves with feminine grace and commands distance perfectly taunting at Don with his facial expressions and movement trying to get him to rush in so he can punish him with kicks and punches. Don though is having none of it, he stays outside of Fayiz's range and plays the same game waiting for him to cross the distance to him. It's like watching a game of chess both fighters testing each other in short bursts of action and then retreating to a safe distance. They are quite evenly matched, Fayiz executes some lovely side kicks at Don and at one point Don sweeps one of the kicks out of the way with his arm and lands a beautiful strike to the face which takes Fayiz off his feet. Fayiz however retains his cool and as he gets up he pantomime's surprise to the crowd, continuing to fight with a zen like composure.

After the fights have finished the real fun begins, I have some ideas as to what the tests are as Nigel (who's done all of them) has made the occasional comment but I have little idea of the order or the details. The general idea is that you have to channel one particular element (fire, earth, wind, water) to negate another, so fire counters stone, water counters fire etc. Sort of like a mystical paper, scissors, stone.

Pak Zianal calls me up first and gets me to stand on scrubby patch of grass with my back to the audience. I'm told to channel fire, I imagine it igniting in my chest and spreading until my whole body is aflame, I'm shaking and twitching with the feeling of energy in my limbs. I can feel Nigel standing behind me, I try to relax and keep my mind focused on the flames, I have no real idea what's coming next so I just try to keep my mind on the meditation. Suddenly Pak Zinals voice cuts through the night in a short sharp command, a couple of seconds later I feel an enormous blow between my shoulder blades, the air is knocked out of me and I take a step forwards.

Trying to keep my composure I push the 'what the fuck was that!' thoughts out of my head and keep my concentration on the flame in my heart. Nigel asks if I'm OK and I nod waiting for what seems like an eternity until Pak Zianal's command barks out again and I feel the stunning impact for a second time, I still manage to keep my feet and after a third blow I'm told that this particular ordeal is over. Don then follows suit and I get to see the size of the rock just thrown at me, it's a solid lump of marble over a foot long and nine inches thick. I'm not sure which of us was in the better position, myself not knowing what was coming next or Don having to watch me knowing that he would have to do same in a few minutes.

Next we switched to fire, Pak Zianal called me up and asks me to roll up my sleeves and trouser legs then with a flaming stick in each hand he runs the flames along my arms and legs, I can feel the heat of the flames on my skin and a sensation of burning but no pain as I try to focus on changing my whole body to water.

After Don has had his turn with the flames we were subjected to more fire, lines of paraffin are drawn on the ground and Pak Zianal and his helpers bend to light them. However as they do so we feel the first spots of rain, there isn't much of it but it's enough to prevent them lighting the ground. Pak Zianal accuses me of using my Yoga powers to summon rain, though to tell the truth I just want to get on with it, I'm more worried about what test we'd have to do instead if they couldn't get the fire lit (some of the others that could have been chosen involve being hit with sharp prarangs or walking on broken glass). Thankfully someone brings out a pile of newspaper and lights it so we can proceed (you know you're in a weird place when you're glad of a pile of burning newspaper). Once the flames are going nicely both myself and Don had to walk through the middle of it, slowly, making sure both feet go through the flames (otherwise they'd make us do it again) . I can feel the flames licking around my feet, ankles and around my shins, but the sensation is the same as the flaming torches, a feeling of heat and burning but no pain. Afterwards I thought I'd burnt my right foot, but five minutes later the feeling had gone.

I'm thinking we must be close to the end now, I try to remember what other tests we might have to do. Then we are called over to the corner of the training area were a metal pan had been set up over a flame, inside it's filled close to the top with boiling oil, sizzling away with bits of ginger floating on top. We both know what we have to do, placing our hands into the oil we have to rub it into our arms and faces, I went first initially hesitant then with more gusto once I realized I wasn't being burnt. Don came after, liberally applying the oil with such abandonment that he managed to splash Pak Zianal who gently mentioned 'You are getting it on me my friend'.

Once this was finished we were brought to the front of the house, battered, bruised, slightly singed and covered in oil. I thought it was all over and breathed a sigh of relief. Then Pak Zianal pulled up Arri and placed him in front of me, speaking in Malay and pointing at his clenched fist, 'Oh bollocks' I thought. Arri takes a big stance and cranks up his fist punching me full belt into the stomach, I take the punch relaxing the muscles and letting the air out of my lungs but the blow still makes me step backwards. Next Arri hit Don who deals with it easily but still our ordeal wasn't over, one of the other lads Eddie steps up and delivers a low sweeping kick full power to my thigh, catching my hand in the process, my finger swells up immediately after the strike and I couldn't walk properly on my leg for a couple of days afterwards but I stayed standing. He tried the same thing with Don but I think he hurt himself more on Don's tree trunk legs than the other way round.

Finally we were finished, Pak Zianal came up and shook our oily hands, congratulating us on our success. We gratefully dragged ourselves to the living room where we sat on the floor to eat a lovely meal prepared by Pak Zianal's wife, followed by music and dancing at the front of the house where the local lads show they are not only talented martial artists but musicians and dancers to.

In all it was one of the craziest nights of my life so far, but by far one of the best. The tests themselves seem insane but follow a definite logic, they confront you with your most primal fears of pain, injury and death and force you to either overcome or succumb to them. We found out afterwards that many had failed the tests previously and been injured, but generally injury happened when fear takes over and hestitation occurs. If you fear the fire and pause you will get burnt, if you are scared and tense then when the stone hits you will be thrown of your feet.

The whole evening is not just to prove your outer strength and skill (though that is equally important because the physical is the gateway to the mental and without that Yang there is no Yin) it is also to test your inner strength and control which is invaluable both on the battle field and in life.

If you can enter into the right mindset you get an inner confidence that you know will carry you through. I knew, as I put on the Silat clothing before we left, that I was going to be fine, it's difficult to explain it's like a quiet calm comes over you and you know that whatever happens you'll be OK. The difficultly now is to carry that feeling past the Khatam into the everyday life, to let the lessons learned there gradually show themselves. A true initiation never ends and I will carry that night with me for the rest of my life, though Khatam may mean end it should also be seen as only the beginning.

Shaolin Master

2006-04-07T21:33:00.000+13:00

Last week I was training at the Shaolin Temple.

Well ok not the real temple, I haven't been suddenly transported to mainland China, instead we visited the home of one of Nigels Martial Arts brothers, Master Wong, where he has built a fair replica in his back garden.

Master Wong is a small rotund man, shaven headed with a little moustache and a permanent grin. A grin that was still on his face when I last saw him a few years ago, standing on his head with two buckets of water hanging off his feet, while two of his students used a sledgehammer to smash a concrete block balanced over his testicles.

The temple is an impressive building. Built by Master Wongs own hands, it stands on the land next to his house. There is a large main training hall decorated with framed newspaper clippings of Master Wong and his students, behind this is a smaller room packed with a large altar, an impressive collection of weapons in racks on the wall and stacks of gaudy Lion heads for various Lion Dances. In the basement there is what one of our number described as 'the room of pain', it contains various training aids for strength and striking training. A large punch bag hangs from the ceiling stuffed with thin strips of bamboo, iron shot of various weights for grip strength lay on padded cushions and a large concrete ball with a rope handle sits on the floor for developing all over body strength.

After our brief tour we return outside and get down to the reason for coming here, push hands. For the next hour or so two of Master Wongs students do a round robin of push hands bouts with me (so they get to rest and I don't) across the bare concrete outside the temple entrance.

For those of you who haven't come across the term 'push hands' before, it's a form of controlled sparring common to Tai-Chi. It's similar(ish) to wing chun sticky hands or Judo Kumite, generally you can't punch or kick (though you can add that in if you want) but you can sweep, lock and push. The idea is that it trains close quarter fighting skills, working on speed, sensitivity and positioning to uproot and disrupt your opponent.

Master Wongs boys were strong, fast and pretty skillful but I was pretty pleased with my performance. I dumped one on his backside a couple of times and even managed to get another in a headlock using tiger returns to the mountain (a move in the Tai-Chi Form, Dave you would have been very proud :-)). Nigel seemed pleased as well, he commented that when I cheated I did it just like him.

After my hour was up, Master Wongs lads went through an impressive display of some of there forms and then we all sat and drank tea at Master Wongs special table come water fountain that he'd built at the other end of his yard.

Other training is going well, I've finished the fast form and have now moved on to doing it with weights (which hurts but makes you do it properly). Pak Zianal has moved from hitting me with sticks to using an axe (the blunt side of the head so far thankfully). We also had a fantastic Journey to a Malay Mystic mountain, but that will have to wait until my next post.

New Key23 article

2006-04-01T18:34:00.000+13:00

I've just put up a new article on Key23 about a visit to some Sufi tombs last week.

http://www.key23.net/occulture/post/360

(Key23 is currently shifting servers, if you find the link above isn't working then give it a few hours and try again).

Adam in chains

2006-03-22T13:45:00.000+13:00

So I've been busy, busy inflicting more masochist's agony on my poor aching body.

Spent a few days last week visiting Fong's parents down in Batu Pahat, this is proper small town Malaysia and as such doesn't get many tourists, so myself and Nigel had to get used to being stared at everywhere we went. It's funny when you're in Penang it's not as noticeable, as they're quite used to seeing foreigners, but outside of these areas you really get reminded of being a minority.

Fongs parents live in a large open plan Chinese style house which seems to be the social hub for the family (Fong has 9 siblings and most of them live in the area) so the place is always humming with activity. Fong's parents were very hospitable and took us out on a number of occasions for food, I'm just about getting used to the idea of rice and noodles or breakfast but it always seems odd eating what feels like an evening meal at 8 in the morning.

I wasn't allowed to escape training while I was there, with Nigel making me run through forms and kick things out the front of the house and Fong taking me up a killer of a local hill (I say hill but it's a steep gradient and takes an hour to walk up) to keep up my fitness.

We left Fongs family the middle of last week and after a brief 4 star luxury stop in KL we arrived back in Penang. If I was being paranoid I'd have thought Pak Zinual had been thinking up new ways to torture me while Id been away, because the first thing he had me do when I got back was spend 20mins meditating kneeling on a chain.

I'd already become acquainted with his chains training method just before I left, he had 2 of them padlocked round my ankles to build up my legs and improve the strength of my kicks, when he First explained what he was going to Nigel jokingly said 'Is going to have them round his neck next?' to which Pak Zinual replied 'How did you know?'. Nigel finds he whole thing most amusing and has is now referring to me as 'The Chained White Man'.

The kneeling thing is a new one though. Sitting on the concrete at the back of Pak Zinual's house, the chain placed in a loop between my shins and the ground, I spent about 20mins letting my body weight sink down on the the loops of metal. I can say for certain that it definitely focuses the mind and once you concentrate on the breathing, sending the mind somewhere else, it is actually surprisingly bearable. The worst part is getting up as the blood rushes back into your limbs and you try and rub the chain pattern out of your flesh (or dragon skin as Pak Zinual calls it).

Outside of Pak Zinuals training, Nigels not been letting me off the hook. He's been re-teaching me the Fast Form (which I've learnt before and forgot), making me shaped dents in his walls during push hands and teaching me a couple of others forms of Silat.

The Silat is very interesting. The first, Silat Tari, is basically a method of traditional dancing but is also supposed to contain the highest techniques of the martial art. You learn a series of basic hand movements and footwork patterns as well as certain animal aspects (Monkey, Snake, Tiger, Dragon, Cat and Deer) and mythical personalities from the Ranayama (an Indian poem also popular in South East Asia). From this you basically enter free form movement (with or without music) moving how you feel the body should move, generally you find the movement principles will spontaneously appear during the dance and you can change the appearance and flavor of the dance by adopting one of the animals or characters.

The second is the Gerak Diri, I'd like to go into more detail with this another time, but basically you are taught to take yourself into a trance from which you again move spontaneously but in a more overtly martial manner. The idea being that if you open yourself up and move naturally you'll defend yourself in the manner most appropriate to you. This does have some parallels in Chinese arts like Spirit Boxing but Nigels points out the Gerak Diri seems more holistic and pragmatic.

Later this week Pak Zinual is going to take myself and Nigel on a little pilgrimage around some important Muslim tombs in Penang and at the beginning of Next month we're going to go to Gunung Ledang a Mountain in the South of Malaysia with many myths and legends associated with it. So stay tuned for more Malaysian madness.

In the footsteps of John Claude

2006-03-08T20:49:00.000+13:00

Before I left for Malaysia Nurul (my friend and project manager at work) bought me a copy of the film Kickboxer as a light hearted going away present, jokingly referring to it as my 'training manual'. It seems irony has a habit of coming back an biting you when you're not looking.

Thankfully I've yet to developed a Belgium accent and oversized ego, or the ability to do the splits between two chairs (Sorry Ken and Nurul) but some of the things I've been doing this week remind me a lot of that film.

Training with Pak Zinual is tough. I've been prowling up and down a bare strip of concrete at the back of his house running through punching Juros (basics) with two lumps of metal clenched in my fist. Afterwards we go to the front of his house where he gets a lump of wood and sticking it into a hole in the concrete gets me to kick it until my shins are the lovely purple colour, pausing only briefly to shadow box the leaves on his trees or rub Thai Boxing liniment on my sore legs.

Training here is pretty old school, there's no air conditioned gyms and specialized equipment. It's like the martial arts equivalent of Salvage Squad, find stuff lying around and make use of it.

Some of his boys came over on Monday and they set me up with a bit of impromptue sparring to see hwo I'd do, apparently I acquitted myself well, though Pak Zinual did make the comment that 'perhaps I don't like my face so much' (referring to the habit I've got of sometimes forgetting to cover my head ;-p).

On top my external bruising and aching Nigel hasn't been letting me escape on the internal pain of Tai-chi front. Running through the form time and time again, holding postures till my legs shake and making subtle adjustments here and there I can already feel changes for the better. Nigels also started teaching me some meditation and breathing exercises linked to a more mystical type of Silat (the name of the indigenous Malay arts) which relies on utilizing the four elements and their corresponding manifestations.

In all the first week has been physically tough as my bodies been adjusting to both the rigours of continual training and the heat. However this is what I wanted to come here for and if what I've learned this week is anything to go by I should hopefully have picked up some very useful new skills and improved my older knowledge by the time I return.

This weekend we're going down south for a few days towards KL to visit Fong's Family (Nigels wife) and visit some of the local Chinese masters. So expect another update towards the end of next week when I get back.

Arrivals

2006-03-05T19:00:00.000+13:00

Well after a truly, um, unique experience flying Air India which made the title of my earlier post quite apt - we're talking a plane that had seen better days in the seventies (hand rests hanging off and Christ it still had the bad wallpaper), still it's not many flights you get an Indian flute player and his tabla accomplice blaring out Indian Ragas a few rows back - I arrived in Penang.

Penang a bustling Island metropolis where Sci-fi skyscrapers sit next to battered Chinese shop houses, where Daotist temples burning fuck off great incense sticks compete with Buddhist Watts, Indian temples and Malaysian Mosques, where a car ride anywhere is taking your life in your own hands. Penang a riot of cultures, religions, people, smells and heat. Since it's inception in the 1800's as the British Empires first foray into Malaysia, Penang has always been one of it's more cosmopolitan cities. Growing rapidly from a small fishing village to almost a state in it's own right this place has always been slightly different from the rest of Malaysia.

I've just about aclimatized now. I had horrendous jet lag for a few days and the heat is intense, the whole thing left me drained and confused, but I'm starting to feel more relaxed and settled now. Training proper started yesterday with Nigel going over my form in the morning and picking out some bad habits I'd developed (got to work on sinking my chest and rounding my shoulders), then we traveled over to Pak Zinals place for me to start my Maui Thai training. Pak Zinal (Pak a respectful term meaning Uncle) is as nicely describes him a bit like those legendary martial arts masters, a humble unassuming man who doesn't stand out from the crowd but has a depth of knowledge and experience that seems bottomless. Already a highly respected in Malaysian Silat he followed his love of Thai Boxing and traveled to it's homeland, learnt the language and a tradtional family style known as White Tiger which is what I'm going to be learning from him while I'm here.

After a formal initiation where I had to give him a knife (the knife representing me the student) and read an oath he had me begin my training, demonstrating the basics of the stance and blocking then testing me out by whacking me with a stick (see I told you all I was going Malaysia to get hit by men with sticks and you all thought I was joking). He then had me moving up and down the space behind his house running through basic punching and kicking drills until my arms felt like they were going to fall off, finishing off with some conditioning exercises including some evil fingertip push ups (all you have to do get in a press up position, put your weight on your fingers then shrug your shoulders. Christ it hurts).

Today I have a day off (my only one of the week) and my body is very sore, I keep finding aches in places I didn't know I had muscles in. Still this is what I wanted, masochist's that I am and I know as the weeks progess my body will get used to the heat and effort and the pain will lessen (well slightly).

At the moment I can only get near a computer about once a week when I come into town so I'll try and update every Sunday, however as I explore a bit I might find an internet cafe that's nearer so I'll be able to update more frequently. I'll let you all know.

Flying into the Abyss

2006-03-01T05:35:00.000+13:00

So this blog has been quiet for the last couple of months, life in the real world has taken up too much of my time to allow me to post anything of note and I never wanted this space to become just another area for me to simply paste links to other sites. However circumstances have changed now and I should hopefully not only be able to post regularly for a while but I'll also have plenty of interesting things to post about.

Tomorrow I hit the road. My current life is packed away in cardboard boxes, stowed in my kindly parents loft, my new life fits neatly into a backpack and is defined solely by usefulness and weight. With my tortoise like home on my back I'm crossing the high seas and landing in Penang, Northern Malaysia, for 3 months. There I'll be training martial arts until I can walk on rice paper without ripping it, do mid-air box splits in slow motion and master the 'Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique'.

In Carlos Castaneda's 'The teaching's of Don Juan' the titular magician said that travel is a method of initiation, now I believe whatever you think of this fictional/real characters existence he was right on this account. Like the fool in the tarot stepping blindly into the precipice you throw yourself out into the unknown, deprived of sleep, shifted from your time zone, detached from the sign posts of culture and peer group that have constantly reflected your own assumptions, you are forced to confront how much of what you perceive as you is simply a collective hallucination, a product of your environment and the culture that nurtured you.

It my hope that I can share some of this initiation here in the virtual world, so expect blood, sweat, tears and waxing on and off...Next stop Malaysia!

Supreme Ultimate

2005-11-03T02:06:00.000+13:00

Recently I've been trying to consolidate my thoughts on what the nature of the divine is to me. These thoughts have been spurred in relation to reading some of the excellent blogs from the burgeoning online Gnostic community (my two favourites being fantastic planet and Ecclesia Gnostica in Nova Albion), my own experiences attending Susan Greenwood and Jo Crow's excellent shamanism workshops, The Spell of the Sensous by David Abrams, Jonathan Miller's Brief History of Disbelief which is being repeated on BBC2 and visiting my lovely girlfriend up in the wilds of Wales.

It seems when often when people talk of their belief or lack of belief in a divine figure many seem to fall into the trap of relating to God in their own image. They see the divine as essentially anthropomorphic and possessed of human qualities. So when bad things happen, be they natural disasters or human calamity, they invariably consider that God is either a mighty pissed malicious bastard to be feared or can't exist, because if he (generally it's a he) did he wouldn't allow these sort of things to happen.

Some interpretations of spiritual systems hold the belief that this Earth is ultimately fallen, that the pain and misery in the world is a result of it's imperfection and that either the commonly worshiped God is in fact our main jailer, or we are deep down no good bastards who deserve all that's coming to us.

This has always been my main stumbling block with most forms of transcendentalist mysticism and why I've never got on with a lot of interpretations of the bible. From my own limited perspective the world to me seems to be one of the most amazing and efficient systems, a self perpetuating ouroborous entity constantly devouring itself to create itself, and our presence and participation in this world is what defines us. I can't bring myself to view the world as a broken lesser thing that lives in the shadow of spirit, to me the world works fine, our problems come when we forget we are a part of it.

Mired in our own petty human concerns we can easily forget we are just a tiny, tiny thread in a massive tapestry of life (not just human life, all life) that stretches out seemingly to infinity in more directions than we can define in our limited vocabulary. We never left the garden of Eden, it's all around us, the only fall was the fall from connection to isolation. If we just stop our collective navel gazing and take a moment to pause and really notice the world around us, the cat prowling along the wall beside us, the bird song heard above the hum of traffic, the moon hung silently in the sky passively observing all with her gentle gaze, we might realize this.

The jealous fire and brimstone god, the jailer Demiurge is just a reflection of ourselves projected out into the world and then mistaken for reality. We hold the keys to our shackles we're just too afraid to use them.

That infinite 'something' that binds us all together, the sense of being embedded in something larger, that to me is 'God'. Not some Daddy figure in the sky that we cry to when we're scared, fear when we've been bad and blame when we feel wronged. Not Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Allah or any of the other masks we've felt the need to force on it when those brave people come back from the edge of experience and try to explain what they've seen. We may find it easier to describe The Divine to others by giving it a human face but the danger here is that people make the classic error of mistaking the map for the territory and worship the symbol instead of looking for the experience themselves.

We need to stop looking out from inside, instead we should just get out into the world and play.

Key 23 is back

2005-10-29T02:17:00.000+13:00

Key 23 is back after it's makeover and looking very nice to.

I've still got to sort out my links here and finish going through correctly formatting my essays (starting to wish I hadn't written so many now :-p) but you can look at the finished product here:

http://key23.net/

Key 23

2005-10-27T03:56:00.000+13:00

The links to my Key 23 articles are not working at the moment because the site is going through an upgrade, I'll change them once the site is back up.

Until then you can laugh at our ugly mugs on the home page (I'm the first picture):

http://key23.net/

Eyes turned inward

2005-10-21T03:27:00.000+13:00

So I'm currently reading David Abram Spell of the Sensuous and I've got to say what a brilliant book. The guys writing is beautiful, lucid enough to explain a complex subject without over romanticism and wild conjecture, yet poetic enough to conjure his spell over you and drag you right into his worldview.

His basic premise is that we as a species have lost touch with nature and our surroundings, that our comodification and exploitation of the natural world comes from our philosophical tendency to separate our-selves from the world around us. Our mind/body or spirit/mind dichotomy alienates from our surrounding and turns us into observers rather than participators of reality.

For example when I look at another object, say a blackbird, I see an object labelled blackbird rather than another intelligent entity that's sharing the experience of reality with me. Or if I rest my back against a tree, I consider only that I feel the tree against my back not that the tree can also feel me.

This was especially poignant for me because I had started reading the book while waiting at Paddington station for a train up to Wales to visit my girlfriend. As I stood there, surrounded by an edifice of steel and glass, overflowing with of hundreds of people about to travel all across the country crammed in little wheeled boxes. I was struck by the overwhelming sense of dislocation cities confer on their inhabitants.

Within nature our senses are encouraged to turn outwards for our own survival. In order to find food and shelter we have to be aware of the subtle changes in our surrounds and engage them in a dialogue. Here nature is capacious, dangerous and awe-inspiring and living in it one must be aware of it's moods and fancies like a volatile lover, one moment soft and gentle the next flinging the plates across the room.

Contrast this with the man made space of cities, nature here is tamed and paved over by the accretions of our own consciousness. I believe with our senses barraged by constant stimulation and surrounded by thousands of tribes all forced to live in one village, we have been forced to turn our attention inwards for our own survival. Constructing mental spaces as a barrier to maintain our sanity against the press of strangers around us, inhabiting the space between our ears and pushing nature away to only be experienced in safe areas of parkland and woods. As I've mentioned before I've come to see cities as objectifications of our own collective consciousness, so it's no wonder that surrounded by our own mental space we've forgotten where that space ends and nature begins, choosing to mistake the earth as an object to own instead of a shared space to live.

Golden Apples

2005-10-20T09:27:00.000+13:00

Flicking through tv channels before work this morning I landed on the Cartoon Network to be greeted by the Grim Reaper and two annoying children arguing over a golden apple with a K on the side.

Intrigued I watched some more and found out the program was called The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, it features the re-occuring character of Eris and her golden apple. I wonder if old Bob knows one of his creations is popping up in a kids cartoon?

All quiet on the western front

2005-10-18T06:22:00.000+13:00

Been a tad quiet in posting recently, mainly because I've been trying to finish a new article for key23. However I'm pleased to say it's now finished and up here so expect some more posts soon.

Gotta Love Synchronicity

2005-09-10T05:10:00.000+13:00

Reading Tim Bouchers journal, I came across this lovely extract from a book by David Abram. He seems a fascinating character and what I've read of his writing so far seems to converge exactly with my own musings at the moment regarding the interaction between consciousness and the environment.

Looks like I've got another book to add to my already huge 'must read now!' list.

Interview with a Gnostic

2005-09-07T05:42:00.000+13:00

I've been enjoying Jordan Stratford's blog on contemporary gnosticism recently, reading his posts has been quite illuminating if you'll pardon the pun. Anyway he's been interviewed on Tim Boucher's website, definitely worth a read.

They're in the trees, they're coming!

2005-09-06T03:36:00.000+13:00

After attending Susan Greenwood and Jo Crows previous shamanic workshop on tree's I've been trying out some journeying at home to see if I could recreate the contact with the tree spirit I had on the day. Due to general busy-ness and my own regular practice I've only been able to work with the journeying twice more in my own time, however the results on both occasions have been very interesting.

14/08/05

I used a shamanic drumming mp3 by Frauke Rotwein to induce the journey, came on very fast, though I had been meditating for about 1/2 hour previous so I was already in an altered state when I started.

I was back at the Yurt in Brighton where the workshop took place, remembered the place quite vividly, began inside the Yurt and walked out to the tree where I'd experienced my previous journeys. Spent a few moments by the tree becoming re-acquainted, then the tree spirit appeared pretty quickly (I do know her name, but it doesn't feel right using it within the public sphere).

We spoke a lot more this time, she said she was pleased to see me and glad I came to visit. At this point I lost my focus a bit and my attention began to waver so she instructed me to feel my feet on the ground and smell the air, which instantly brought my attention back to the journey.

She then explained that she wanted to explain more on how the tree acted as a bridge between worlds but that she would do that the next time she saw me. At this point I felt drawn back to my body and I said my goodbyes and went back to the Yurt and my seated body.

20/08/05

Used drumming Mp3 again, but this time I also incorporated my mind-machine on a setting designed to produce a deep theta state in order to see what affect that had on the journey.

Began again in the Yurt and walked back to the tree. The spirit appeared, this time I asked what sort of offerings I could bring the tree, she said anything like food or something I'd made.

She said this time she'd show me how to use the tree to move between worlds, either the upper or the lower I had to choose one. I decided the upper (no particular reason why, just felt like the right one at the time). She instructed me sit on a tree branch, I did as asked and the tree began to grow upwards as a rapid rate. The branch took me up past the tree canopy and through the cloud cover, up above the clouds I stepped off the branch and began to walk across the cotton wool surface (which needless to say took my weight). In the distance I could see a city skyline, I walked towards it soon coming to a jetty like structure on it's outskirts. Climbing onto the jetty I walked into the city, a combination of Moorish architecture and glittering sky-scrapers. There were beings there but they were distant and difficult to make out and it didn't feel like the time to make contact with any of them. Instead I just wandered around a nearby plaza for a little bit, before I decided to head back.

Coming back the way I came, I descended back into the forest on the tree branch, said my goodbyes and returned to the Yurt and my body.

You can see a progression with both journeys, both in the complexity of the experience and the length of time the journey took. It was interesting on the first occasion to attempt a journey after having spent time previously meditating (I'm currently practising a combined meditation practice where I and watch my thoughts, then gaze on a red triangle to the exclusion of all other thoughts and then switch back to watching my thoughts etc.), the speed I entered the experience was definitely quicker because there wasn't that normal surface chatter to quiet down before the trance state took hold.

The use of the mind-machine on the second occasion I think definitely helped make the experience stronger, which would make sense because the theta-state is associated with the hypnogogic state the mind enters just before sleep, a state highly conducive to a visionary experience.

The other fascinating thing is how the Yurt and the Tree Spirit are becoming integral parts of the process. A physical space I have visited has now entered into my own mythical symbol system as a gateway between worlds which I can visit from any geographical location, while the tree spirit seems to be becoming an integral guide and teacher in this process.

The concept of 'the otherworld' is an integral part of most, if not all, shamanic practices. Could this concept be a codified way of explaining the bridge between our subjective and objective experience? When I'm in a journeying state I'm aware of my body in a room sitting with it's eyes closed but I'm also aware of being somewhere else, aspects of my waking world are now part of the 'otherworld' and parts of the 'otherworld' encroach into meatspace in a feedback loop of meaning. The otherworld doesn't appear to be separate realm but rather an overlay of meaning that envelops our environment with like a blanket.

I'm just idly musing here, these are just concepts that are drifting around my head at the moment and I'm not sure if I've got the words to explain myself correctly yet. Even if we reduce this down to the most mundane (though still incredibly magical) experience of a process that is solely contained within the electrical processes of my brain, it doesn't make the the journey's any less remarkable. Here I have parts of my subconscious using narrative to teach me techniques for better accessing my own creative faculties, my brain teaching my brain how to work more efficiently. Now that is pretty cool.

Objectifing the subjective

2005-08-31T00:46:00.000+13:00

Went to a talk on Magick and Psychogeography at Treadwells the other Friday and as usual a lot on interesting stuff was brought up which left me much to mull over. The speaker, Julian Vayne a Chaos Magician and member of the I.O.T, outlined how he used Psychogeographical techniques as a way of expanding his magickal practice into his surrounding environment. He gave accounts of several rituals he'd engaged in that used the landscape as an active participant in both a structured and freeform manner.

In one instance he gave an account of a group working that involved taking a 20/30 people on a guided tour of Bath following a specific route and intent. This mobile ritual involved performing certain actions at designated stations (for instance speaking glossolia into mobile phones) and culminated in the whole group running back to the starting point of the tour singing 'row, row, row your boat' as a mantra. As a contrast he explained of another working which involved an ambling walk along a path performing whatever ritual, exercise or invocation felt right at that time and location.

His ideas struck me as very similar to the Shamanic workshop I'd attended a few weeks previous where we were encouraged to form a dialogue with aspects of the environment (in this case trees). These ways of working both seem to encourage the intermingling our subjective and objective experiences into a personal narrative structure, one that's ripe with symbolic meaning but anchored in the physical plane.

The other thing that seems common here is that both view our interaction with the world as two way conversation. We write meaning into our surroundings (many have written of how our world is perceived through a veil of own our preconceptions and maps) but our surroundings also write back to us. Whether this be the position of heavenly bodies for navigation, droppings indicating the location of the hunted or the overt manipulation of advertising symbols. The world is always talking to us and we are always listening, it's just most of the time the conversation takes place below the level of conscious thought. However by beginning to pay attention to this subtle interplay between us and our environment I think it's possible to make process overt, if we cut our internalized mental chatter and turn our consciousness outwards, we can become more aware of the messages we are receiving and use them to develop our own methods for communication.

This idea of layers of meaning in our surroundings, subtle architecture of imagination, appears to be especially poignant in the man made structure of cities. Think about it, cities are the product of our hands and minds, the subjective made objective. They are human imagination ossified into brick, stone, concrete and glass. Walking through a city (especially one as ancient as London) is like walking through the collective unconsciousness of the culture that created it.

It reminds me again of Susan Greenwood's explanation of the 'Web of Wyrd' in her book 'The Nature of Magic' we are each part of an interconnected whole, a matrix of overlapping stories each making up a grand narrative. Normally we're so caught up in our own little soap opera's we don't notice our interaction with the wider story of existence, the act of magic then could be seen as recognizing our part in the story and becoming an active in it's creation as opposed to just a mere jobbing actor, tiredly repeating someone else's lines.

Search and Destroy

2005-08-22T10:23:00.000+13:00

Last month my long time Tai-Chi teacher Nigel Sutton was over in England on one periodic visits from Malaysia, where he's been living for twenty odd years now studying marital arts full time.

Nigel's main art is Tai-Chi, but he has trained in various Chinese Kung-Fu systems (internal and external) as well as holding teaching qualifications in several indigenous Malaysian Silat styles. So yeah he's pretty good and his visits always leave my brain (and body) hurting.

This visit we spent a lot of time going over Tai-Chi's fighting aspects. Tai-Chi can be an enigma to a lot of westerners, when it first appeared in the west it was touted as an alternative health method and it's martial origin's were often either downplayed or ignored. The most common reaction to Tai-Chi when first encountered is 'it's just moving slowly and poncy arm waving isn't it?' (amusingly this confusion is non-existent outside of Europe and the United States).

It's true that taken at face value the slow movements of The Form (which are the core movements of Tai-Chi and what most equate with the whole art) do not seem martial in the slightest, but by actually practicing the moves and understanding the underlying mechanisms one can see what is actually happening.

Tai-Chi is primarily a principle based art, there is a great saying (which I can't for the life of me remember where it's from) 'Teach a man a technique and he has one technique, teach a man a principle and he has a thousand techniques'. The Form first and foremost teaches correct posture and efficient movement, these are the cornerstones of Tai-Chi and everything else is built on them.

This brings me back nicely to the stuff that Nigel was playing with this time around. Tai-Chi is a close range art, it's strengths come from short range attacks, relaxed strength and heightened sensitivity to an opponents movements. Combined these are ideally used to over-power the attacker by gaining control of the their centre of balance and turning any energy used against them. With this in mind Nigel has come up with 5 points that break down how Tai-Chi works in a combat situation.

Cover the distance - the most dangerous point, the practitioner has move in past the opponents weapon's (fists, feet, whatever) into a comfortable fighting range.
Control - once you're within range you then have to close down the opponent's options using ting-jing to take control of the their centre of gravity. Ting-jing can be roughly translated as listening energy, it's a skill trained within Tai-Chi where you become fine tuned to a persons balance and movement so you can 'stick' and follow them.
Unbalance - once you have control of their centre you can then take them off balance, both physically and mentally (often just the act of getting into someone's space is enough to unbalance them mentally). This can be in the form of a lock, a throw or a strike.
pressurize - now you have them at a disadvantage, you keep them there. Using your control of their centre and strikes/locks/throws you prevent them being able to gather their wits and re-gain control of the situation.
Destroy - the obvious, once you have them off balance and confused, you end the situation decisively and generally nastliy. Yes this isn't very pleasent but then again violence of any kind seldom is.

The important thing to remember here is that once you get into range and gain control, you keep it. Not allowing your opponent to regain their composure or balance.

Another thing that Nigel brought up that is worth expanding on here is the that 'the best arts are reactive and not active'. This is one of those sayings that seems quite basic on the surface but holds a lot of meaning.

If you instigate an attack then there is a conscious decision to make that attack, even if this is just a flicker on across the brain, there is still a lag between thinking of making a move and actually making it. However if you react, simply by instinct, then there is no conscious process so therefore no lag time, this method is summed up in the Tai-Chi classics as 'he moves first, I arrive first'.

Obviously you want to make sure that whatever your action is it's one relevant to the situation, this is where endless hours of repetitive training comes in. By ingraining certain ways of moving into your synapses through training the Form and other exercises, then testing that movement under pressure in push-hands and sparring, you train your body to react instantaneously to an attack without the interruption of conscious thought.

Pakistan maybe a hot-bed of terroist activity

2005-08-18T03:57:00.000+13:00

apparently, but there also seems to be a thriving Sufi community there to:

The mystical form of Islam espoused by Sufi saints for hundreds of years continues to thrive in Pakistan despite opposition from religious hardliners and the authorities.

link found via Mmothra

The map may not be the territory

2005-08-18T03:45:00.000+13:00

But as maps go this is pretty cool.

http://earth.google.com/

I'm just waiting for the patch that lets me hook it into an orbital laser.

You're a fool if you think it's over

2005-08-09T22:09:00.000+13:00

But for the moment it is. After 2 odd years of seemingly endless lost weekends and evenings with my head buried in books (OK no change there), or writing essays, or designing lesson plans, or drawing stick men in anatomically questionable positions. After countless bizarre and meaningful conversations regarding the nature of existence, the meaning of the Self and how the fuck do you explain it all in less than 2000 words. After countless hours of driving to and from Wales and spending many weekends half way up a mountain (OK a very big hill, but mountain sounds better) locked in a farm house debating, writing and bending with some very lovely people. It is finally over, I am now a fully paid up member of the Yogi squad, a British Wheel of Yoga qualified teacher.

With my new teacher status I'm able to levitate at will, wear a loin cloth in public without fear of arrest and my countless disciples must throw rose petals before me wherever I go (well OK the levitation may need some work and I need to get some disciples before I start handing out the rose petals, but if the weather's good this weekend I might try the loincloth).

So after all that was it worth it? Well at the risk of sounding like I've escaped from 'Team America', Fuck yeah! People tell you at the beginning that it is a life changing experience and to be perfectly honest I didn't believe them, it's just a course right? You do a few essays and get a bit of paper at the end and that's it. Well now I'm here and looking back I can see they were totally right.

Hand on heart this has been probably one of the best experiences of my life. It's altered and widened my view of Yoga and what it is, made me question and re-evaluate my reasons for teaching, made me realise that I was stuck in a self destructive pattern at work and caused me to totally change my job, it has inspired me to start writing again, rekindled my interest in all things esoteric and (last but by no means least) it has introduced me to a group of the most interesting, inspiring, diverse and truly lovely people I've ever had the pleasure to meet. What more could you want?

Right I'd best stop now before I go all misty eyed and the audience starts to vomit, I'm going to go and sit on my laurels for a bit and think about what I can do with my new found teacher status (I get a card and everything, I'm looking forward to waving it at people and shouting 'Yoga teacher, get down on the floor and relax!'). Hmmm the possibilities are endless, you know I've always fancied myself as a cult leader. White robes never go out of fashion and it'd be handy having all those disciples to do the washing up (and the rose petals, mustn't forget the rose petals).....

V for vendetta

2005-08-03T02:57:00.000+13:00

Shock! Horror! Stop the press! Can it be? An adaptation of an Alan Moore work that doesn't suck?

Well if the new V for Vendetta trailer is anything to go by the Wachowski Brothers may have finally pulled their heads out of their arses after disappearing there in The Matrix 2 and produced something that's worth watching.

Of course it's only a trailer and there's still time for them to jump the story in a dark alley and stab it in the back, leaving it to bleed to death in the box office gutter. But I live in hope.

Tree Hugger

2005-08-03T02:38:00.000+13:00

I had a very interesting couple of days this weekend. Spent most of it down on the coast near Brighton, firstly on a workshop with Susan Greenwood and Jo Crow learning techniques of shamanism. Then on Sunday training with my long time teacher, Tai-Chi master and general martial arts aficionado Nigel Sutton who's over on one of his periodic visits from Malaysia.

This post will deal mainly with my experiences of the Saturday shamanism workshop, I'm going to do a separate post on the stuff Nigel's been teaching as there's a lot to go through.

The workshop was held in a Yurt (or possibly a Gurt, but I'm not too up on the stylistic differences) in some woods around Brighton. It was themed around trees, their place within an animistic worldview and the practical aspects of opening lines of communication.

The course was implicitly a practical one, with philosophical discourse kept to a minimum. We were given the opportunity to take take various 'journeys' and then encouraged to discuss our experiences on our return. There were six others on the course with me but I'm going to stick with my own journeys here, one because they are easier to recollect and two I don't know if the others would want their own stories published in the public domain.

The first exercise involved going out into the surrounding woods and finding your own tree to commune with. After leading us through a very lovely preparatory meditation and shifting our perceptions into a more open state via the use of a rattle we were all sent outside to find a tree.

As I left the cosy confines of the Yurt, after this period of meditation and opening up, I found my senses were suddenly much more alive to the increased sensory input. The colours and sounds were more 'there' as if someone had just cleaned glasses you hadn't realised had become fogged.

Walking away from the immediate surrounds of the Yurt I began to walk down a nearby path, but after walking a few yards I found that I kept thinking of a particular clearing right back where I had started. So, deciding to pay attention to my gut feeling, I turned around and came back.

As soon as I came back to the clearing I noticed a particular tree. It had been partially uprooted in a storm and the first part of it's trunk was almost horizontal to the ground, then it bent sharply upwards and shot into the canopy obviously grasping for he light. I figured this tree looked like it had a story to tell so I decided to stay with it.

Standing by the tree, I tried to keep my senses open and tune into it's presence. We had all been given a rattle to use on our walk and I used this intermittently to keep myself in a slightly altered state (not having used rattles before, I was surprised to find it rattling seemingly of it's own accord whenever I needed it). I spent a bit of time with the tree, observing and placing my hands on it, there was no sense of actual verbal communication but a definite feeling of connection.

Coming back to the Yurt we all lay on the floor and commenced journeying, with Jo pounding a beat on a circular drum I lay there and tried to ride the rhythm to somewhere else.

I wasn't holding much hope of anything actually occurring as normally when I lie down to relax in a yoga class I invariably nod off. However after a couple of false starts and a few thoughts of 'nope, this isn't working' I found my mind being drawn to the image of the tree I'd just spent time with. Holding the image of the tree in my minds eye, with the second heart beat of the drum pulsing through the tent, I suddenly found that I'd been joined by a woman dressed in green robes (it was very much a 'Mr Ben' moment, as if by magic a woman in green appeared). She sat on a bench by the tree her face covered with a hood, turning her head and standing she drew back the hood to revel a distinguished and handsome face with green hair and eyes.

Now I was quite surprised by this, I hadn't forced this to happen and none of the previous conversation of the day had laid any seeds of this nature within my mind. We stood by each other, as earlier no real verbal communication took place (though she did tell me she was a Dryad and gave me her name) but I felt comfortable with her there. At one point she hugged me and I felt that I became suddenly much more grounded like a tree and at another I felt the need to cough but placed her fingers on my throat and the need went away. Then the rhythm of the drum changed and I was being called back to the tent, I said my good byes and returned to the Yurt.

After a discussion of our experiences and some lunch we proceeded on to work with some other aspects of trees, this time the concepts of the underworld and the upper-world common in so many mythologies.

We each chose a part of a tree. Half the objects were tree roots while the other half were aspects of it's canopy such as branches, leaves or berries. I began with a tree root, one that I felt was suitably wand like, and I lay on the floor with it clutched across my breast. As this was straight after lunch I found that my attention kept drifting to the edges of sleep and a clear vision was difficult to maintain, however I did find a continuing theme that kept reoccurring as I lay in the shallows of sleep.

First It felt as though the root began to grow in my hand and wrap it's tendrils around my body in a cocoon. Thus mummified I was drawn into the earth where I lay, the sound of drumming echoing through the earth. As I looked up I could see a large tree growing from the centre of my chest it's branches reaching far above me.

After we were called back from the journey we were then asked to stand up and, keeping the feeling of the vision, see if we could translate the feelings into a dance. As Jo and Susan beat a vigorous rhythm we tried to join with the drum beat and allow it to find it's expression.

I'll admit I found this bit difficult and couldn't find myself getting into the rhythm. I wasn't feeling particularly self conscious but maybe there was a part of me that was reluctant to let myself get into it. Plus I couldn't get the image of Bez from the Happy Mondays out of my head, which was understandably most distracting. Anyway I chalk that one up to experience and it's something I'll have to work with.

For the second journey I chose a small branch with leaves at the end of it, there was no reasoning behind this other than it looked nice. This time I decided to stay sitting upright as I felt I would be able to maintain my concentration better. The drumming began again and I concentrated on the beat filling the Yurt, hearing the subtle song that sits just under the surface of the rhythm. A strange siren harmonic, like an angelic choir hidden in somewhere in the drums skin.

This time my mind settled on the meditation we began the day with, I felt a tree growing outwards from my heart it's roots sitting down in the earth and it's branches reaching for the sky. I stayed with this feeling for a while, feeling the wind through my branches, when I suddenly felt I could reach higher. I felt my tree self expand and my branches reach right up, breaking the surface of the clouds. Looking down my trunk/body I could see the earth far below me and my roots buried in the soil, I realised I'd become the world tree, bridging the three worlds. I kept with this feeling until the drum called me back, shrinking the tree into my chest and back to the Yurt.

Again for the second dance I had much the same problem as before, I think the difficulty is that I'm used to meditating from a static position and I find trying to maintain that state of mind while moving quite challenging.

After these two journeys we sat and discussed what had happened, sharing our individual experiences with the group. I was impressed with Susan and Jo's methodology of letting the journeys talk for themselves, we weren't forced to shoehorn our visions into a particular worldview or symbolic system, rather I believe they wanted us to use them to begin to create our own experiential maps instead of trying to contain them within a formal structure.

Did these experiences have any objective reality outside my own head? Would someone else going to the same tree have the same experience and met the same being? Possibly not, but I think we find the experience we need at the time and dress it in the appropriate clothes.

As to the question of was this all in my head? Well in my own opinion I think consciousness is far more complicated and expansive than a simple lump of tissue carried in evolutions own crash helmet. But even if the whole thing was a product of an overactive imagination, does it matter at the end of the day? Working this way is encouraging us to interact with our environment in a dynamic way, blending the subjective and the objective. To often do we draw a sharp boundary between what is 'out there' and 'in here' when really our lives are constructed on the shore between the two. Instead of sitting behind our eyes and looking out, relying on other peoples maps of reality, we can begin to create our own personnel mythologies, stories and relations with the landscape from direct experience. We are not just talking to the world but also hearing it answer back.

As my first direct experience of shamanism I feel I have come away with a lot of new things to play around with, but also a sense of connection to my own practices. It's nice to do something new and find there is already a lot of common ground, fresh ways of looking at the same thing.

Peter Lamborn Wilson

2005-07-14T06:01:00.000+13:00

Peter Lamborn Wilson, sometimes also known as Hakim Bey, the inimitable author of T.A.Z and Pirate Utopias talks at Chaos Day 2002 on Spiritual Anarchism. Well worth a listen.

www.radio4all.net

Suicide bombing as a virus

2005-07-13T21:59:00.000+13:00

So it seems the worst fears are realized, the London bombers were home grown and suicide. No sinister foreign terrorists sneaking over the border on forged passports, no sleeper agents of some worldwide evil empire, just four guys from Yorkshire and some backpacks of explosives.

I was Listening to the Today program on Radio 4 this morning as they discussed the bombings and something one of the commentators said (I missed his name but he's producing a program on channel 4 about the history of suicide bombers) really struck a cord. He said 'suicide bombing is a virus that's transmitted via media'.

This, I think, hits the nail on the head and sums up the difference between this situation and say that of the IRA. The IRA were/are an organization with clear aims and objectives and definable leaders and structure . Al-Qaeda on the other hand appears to be a generic media term that is used to describe many different groups with many disparate (and often conflicting) ideologies. The idea of this shadowy organization with Osama Bin laden as it's head, sitting in his underground hideout plotting the end of the Western World is Doctor evil style, is in my opinion bollocks. The only thing that links most of these groups together is that they have a distorted view of Islam, they think capitalism and the west is the root of all evil and death in the service of a higher cause is a good thing.

It seems that what we're dealing with here is something far more elusive than a shadowy and sinister organization. It's an idea, a particularly virulent viral meme. It seeds itself via websites and chat rooms, is nurtured and grown in the soil of hate and disenfranchisement and eventually kills it's host. Trying to fight this idea with guns, arrests and an 'US' against 'THEM' dichotomy is stupid, pointless and just produces more mental fertilizer for the idea to grow in. The only way to fight ideas is through other ideas. Ideological antibiotics, administered through the opening of dialogue between communities, breaking down boundaries instead of setting them up and nurturing more beneficial strains of meme.

It seems to me that the same mistake is being made here that was made in the first world war when the generals sent their cavalry in against the machine guns, technology has changed the rules of engagement but the entrenched power structures are still using the same reactionary tactics, wildly shooting at shadows, trying to find an enemy that they'll never be able to pin down.

More Dave and Malcolm on Key23

2005-07-06T05:56:00.000+13:00

Thanks to comments from a friend of mine there is a new Dave and Malcolm adventure on Key23. It's amusing that two characters who originally popped into my head as a plot device have now started to take on a life of their own.

television the drug of a nation

The balance between the hard and the soft

2005-06-16T04:37:00.000+13:00

I've been training in Martial Arts for going on 10 years now, predominately in Cheng Man Ching Tai-Chi, a 'soft' style of Chinese Gung-fu. My training has gone through many peaks and troughs over the years, periods of revelation and frantic ideas followed by plateau's of varying lengths with a feeling of nothing much happening until the next revelation and so on. I've termed it the 'Fuck Me Factor' or FMF for short, as in the exclamation "Fuck me I've got it!" that generally occurs after a moment of extreme clarity.

I came to a realization long ago, after many sweaty hours scaring neighbors swinging swords about in my garden and whacking friends and strangers in various generic sports halls dotted around the country (as well as a couple of trips to Malaysia, where the experience was similar but the sweating much more intense) that undertaking any activity with the view of mastery is stupid and ultimately self defeating. 'It's not the destination it's the journey' is a clichéd and hackneyed saying but the reason it's so over used is because it's very true.

At this particular point in time my training is going through some interesting twists and turns, mostly inspired by a beating I took in a full contact competition last year. What it boiled down to was that I kept dropping my guard and staying out on the end of my opponents fists, meaning I got smacked in the head, a lot. I termed this a 'learning experience' but as my friend and (very good) martial artist Glenn pointed out, you really don't want too many of those.

After this 'experience' I changed my training pattern. I added in harder elements and started going to a boxing gym down the road from my flat to get in more sparring. After I had been doing this for a few months I went to a seminar by a visiting Tai Chi master in the Chen Style (A different style to the one I normally practice) going back and practicing pure Tai-Chi after months of harder stuff made me realize that I had begun to lose that softer element, that feeling relaxed power and connection between body, breath and mind that Tai Chi does so well. My mind was drawn back that something else that Glenn had said (and I really should have listened to in the first place), for every hour of hard training you should do two of soft.

Now actually achieving this two to one ratio in real life is pretty hard, trying to balance all my Yoga studies, a full time job and a social life with Tai-Chi training is difficult as it is (though not impossible if you're willing to get up a bit earlier in the morning) but the rationale of a balance between hard and soft training is a fundamental one.

So what is all this issue with hard and soft styles? Within martial arts in general, but especially Chinese and Japanese disciplines, you often see one art classified as a 'hard' style and another a 'soft', for instance Karate and Five Ancestors Gung Fu are seen as hard styles and Aikido and Tai-Chi are normally classified as soft. Hard styles generally rely on physical strength and conditioning while soft styles are distinguished by an emphasis on flowing movement, physical alignment and the structural displacement of an opponent. Of course this is just a gross generalization and often you see many elements of one in the other, as my teacher always states all martial arts are heading to the same destination, they just take slightly different routes to get there.

This is where we come back, in a roundabout fashion, to the question of balance. In my view there have to be elements of both hard and soft, yin and yang in any training otherwise you are really only studying half an art. I've seen many martial artists of harder styles who move like robots and are plagued by injury in later life because of to much harder training in earlier years. One of my teachers, teacher's, teachers Master Lau a man now in his seventies who's Tai-Chi is phenomenally good and can throw around men half his age and twice his size has a permanent shaking in his hands brought on from conditioning exercises he did when he trained Shaolin Gung Fu in his youth.

On the other side of the coin there are many within the Tai-Chi fraternity who see 'force' and 'strength' as a dirty word, considering anything remotely physical (like cardiovascular work or actual contact) as 'too hard'. This dream world where they're able to yield to any force and gently lead an attacker with the barest touch is normally resoundingly shattered as soon as someone punches them in the head.

Soft training enables the subtler aspects of Tai-Chi to begin to take root in the body. Teaching the student how to marry the breath, mind and body into one unit so that it becomes a vehicle for the intent, so that all action is applied using the most efficient body mechanics and the minimum amount of effort. Hard training builds strength and endurance, allows the lessons learned from the soft training to be applied at speed and under pressure and, most importantly , teaches you what it's like to get hit (it's no good having a punch that can shatter concrete if your jaw is made of glass).

Without this harder edge you lose that mental toughness and physical conditioning required in martial arts and without the inherent softness you loose that flowing and effortless power cultivated in the tai-chi form. The Tai-Chi (yin-yang) symbol is probably the best example of this principle. As Yin reaches it's peak it becomes Yang and vise versa. A union of opposites, each one containing a part of the other.

Normality isn't what it used to be

2005-05-28T03:46:00.000+13:00

The daffodils were screaming, a fractured glass wail that snaked the spine like a glue sniffers rush as the crocodile babies snapped off flower-heads with glass jaws, singing merry hymns, the sounds of fingernails on blackboards stretched out like candy floss. The road bucked and weaved disappearing into an impossible perspective while the walls of buildings assumed strange and threatening angles speaking of more dimensions than the obvious three.

Malcolm turned his head away nausea rushing up from his gut, the world rushed into solidity like the ground coming up to meet a falling suicide, he rushed past Dave and threw up into a nearby hedge. Dave looked at the younger man with some amusement, he'd tired to warn the young Copper but Malcom had brushed him off with youthful machismo. Dave sighed, coughing he took a packet of Embassy No1 out of the inside pocket of his stained tweed jacket and pulled a cigarette out with nicotine stained fingers, still he'd been the same at his age.

"Feeling better?" He said as he took a puff on his cigarette, looking down at the young policeman with a look of fatherly concern.

"Christ! It's, It's...." Malcolm spluttered pulling his head out of the hedge and wiping his mouth, trying very hard to keep his gaze from what was going on behind the flimsy yellow strip of police tape that cordoned off one end of the quiet suburban street.

"Well I hate to say I told you so.." Dave shrugged and took another puff on his cigarette, glancing at his watch. He had himself carefully positioned so his back was to the scene behind him, even so he still couldn't block out the inhuman wail that cut through the air causing car alarms three streets away to start going off.

"Fuck what was that!" Malcolm said covering his ears, instantly he began to turn his head towards the sound. Dave took a step to the side, placing his bulky frame between him and the unfolding scene at the end of the road.

"That, was the sound of someone trapped in the rift, and it's best you don't look. Unless you fancy waking up in the middle of the night screaming for the rest of your life, as well as losing what's left of your breakfast" Malcolm looked up at Dave and shook his head. From his position, the sun behind Dave throwing him into shadow, he looked more like some Easter Island statue than an old chain smoking Policeman.

"I thought last week was weird, but this..Well it's fucked isn't it?" Malcolm, finally pulling himself upright, stood to one side of Dave his back also to the scene unfolding. He tried to keep his attention on the two or three uniformed coppers who were moving in and out of the other houses on the street checking that they were all empty.

"This is different, last week was your just your bog standard timeloop. I've seen it before, bunch of muppets stage a series of revival nights. They get through the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's in the first few months. Once you get to the 90's it's only a short hop from there to the noughties and then with nowhere else to go they start doing a last Wednesday revival then a Yesterday revival and before you know it they're stuck in a self referential loop constantly reviving the last 5 minutes. Best piece of advise I can give you Malcolm, stay away from any evenings entertainment with the words 're-live' and 'the' in the title." Dave took a last drag on his cigarette and threw it to the floor, as he placed his heel onto the still smouldering fag-butt and ground it into the pavement he felt the seemingly solid concrete buckle slightly under his weight.

"What times he due?" Malcolm asked, noticing Dave's unease.

"Anytime now" Dave replied checking his watch

"Which reminds me" Smiling slyly at Malcolm's puzzled look Dave bent down and picked up a supermarket carrier bag lying at his feet. Reaching inside he took out two large multi-colored jester's hat's, the sort you'd normally see being sported by drunk students at festivals, and two sets of novelty glasses.

"Here put these on" He said passing a hat and glasses to the gobsmacked Malcolm

"Are you taking the piss?!" Malcolm waved his glasses at Dave, half ping-pong balls painted with blood shot eyes swung wildly on springs as Malcolm stared with that half squint of someone trying to work out if he's about to be the butt of a joke.

"Stop whining and put them on, it's for your own good" Dave had put on the hat and glasses. His came with a false nose and moustache, which conspired to give him the look of an older, fatter Groucho Marx.

Malcolm still muttering pulled the hat on his head and shoved the glasses on his nose.

"I feel like a right prick" He complained.

"If it's any consolation, you look like one." Dave replied.

Their conversation was interrupted by the rumble of an engine from the road in front of them, around the corner came such a strange sight that Malcolm momentarily forgot about the twisted hell that existed just a few paces behind him. It was a school bus, an American school bus to be exact, but instead of the familiar Yellow that Malcolm grew up watching on Saturday morning TV from the States this one was painted in wild psychedelic motifs and colours, on the front the school sign had been replaced with a large silver 'FURTHER'.

"OK really, this day can't get any stranger" Malcolm tried to bring his hand to his forehead but the dangling eye's from his glasses got in the way.

"You're about to find out how true that statement is" Dave said smiling and lighting another cigarette.

"The FBI lent us the bus, it's got so much ingrained craziness in it's psychometric structure that it's the only thing we've found that can contain him" As Dave finished his sentence, they both felt the ground lurch under there feet. Malcolm resisted the strong urge to look behind him, the flowers in the garden next to him begin to whisper to each other in fragile baby doll voices and he new it was to late.

"Fuck it's spreading" Malcolm cried out, Dave had to take him by the shoulder to stop him bolting.

"Keep calm son, things are about to get a lot more normal" Dave tried to keep his tone reassuring but Malcolm was sure he could hear a twinge of doubt in his voice.

The Eggmen were dancing on his arm, while the jangle birds swam backwards to the sound of liquorice. Malcolm turned his head to shout at Dave but all he could see was the colour of cymbals. Cymbals, cymbals it's all just symbols. The doors are opening he thought he heard someone say, the doors where? In his head? The doors where already flung open there, to let the air in and the ghosts out, his brains spilling on the gingerbread pavement.

"The doors are opening, he's here" Dave said as reality suddenly snapped back into focus like someone had retuned the signal, Malcolm realised he was clinging to the pavement and sobbing.

The back of the bus had opened and light spilled out from the inside. Malcolm shook his head in disbelief, ping pong balls bouncing on the end of springs, trying to comprehend what he saw. The back of the bus was decorated like a small living room, flock wallpaper adorned the walls, a small rug was laid out infront of a gas fire, there were even model ducks in flight stuck to one of the walls. In the middle of all this sat, on a very comfortable armchair, a small very average looking man. A man in a cardigan and slippers, reading a paper and smoking a pipe.

"That's Norman Smith? That's the man who's so dangerous they have to keep him locked in a specially constructed fun house in the middle of the Wiltshire Downs?" Malcolm asked in complete befuddlement.

"That's him" Dave said matter of factly, looking down at Malcolm who was still clinging to the pavement like it was a life raft.

"Golly!" Said Malcolm, he had meant to say 'Fuck!' but suddenly he couldn't seem to form the swear word in his head.

Norman Smith got up and stepped out of the van, as he exited it's confines Malcolm started to notice strange things occurring to the surrounding area. It was difficult to put an exact finger on what it was, but reality seemed to get more real. The paving stones seemed more solid, the hedges lining the gardens seemed to become straighter and their edges more precise. It was as if someone had come down and tidied everything up when no one was looking. Norman walked towards them, as he got closer the effect got stronger, it was as if all the hazy edges and fuzzy doubts you might have had about the solidity of reality and your place in it were washed away and replaced by a firm certainty that everything was running like the clockwork it was.

Norman paused by Dave and turned and smiled at him

"Hello Dave, this the new boy?" He said nodding at Malcolm, who was looking increasingly uncomfortable in Normans presence.

"He is, say hello Malcolm" Dave patting the bewildered Malcolm on the shoulder.

"Hello" Malcolm said involuntarily raising his hand because something told him it was the proper thing to do.

"Best if we don't shake" Norman said and raised his hand to wave instead. Malcolm followed suit. Suddenly, inexplicably, he was grasped by an incredible urge for a cup of tea.

"Don't worry, the effects won't last long after I've gone" Norman said and he walked past them.

"You'll want to turn round and watch this" Dave said

Malcolm and Dave turned round, at first Malcolm had to fight back the nausea again as his brain tried to comprehend the twisted reality of the rift but then he realised that as Norman walked towards it reality seemed to solidify around him like cooling lava. Focusing on Norman like a visual anchor Malcolm watched as he ducked under the yellow police tape and stepped into the heart of the chaos.

Angles righted themselves around him, impossible spectrums of colours settled back into their normal range, sounds that could only be described as a shape silenced. The rift disintegrated in the presence of Smith's certainty.

"My word!" Was all Malcolm could manage.

"Amazing isn't it, a man who's view of reality is so strong, so certain that it affects the nearby fabric of space-time to conform with his views. It's why we use him in situations like this and it's why he normally can't got within 6 miles of human habitation." Dave shook his head, he'd seen him do this several times but it still gave him the willy's.

Norman had almost finished his work now. The street had coalesced back into it's bland averageness, like memory plastic snapping back to it's original shape. There were several people wandering aimlessly in the street looking around with bewilderment on their faces.

"What's going to happen to them? Shouldn't we go and help them?" Dave asked pointing to a nearby woman in a ripped floral print dress, her bare feet dragging across the pavement as she stumbled against a post box.

"No need for that lad, the others will deal with them" Dave said and waving his arm summoned a couple of the uniformed police. They ran past Dave and Malcolm and ducked under the tape, each of them was carrying what looked like an MP3 player and headphones. Malcolm watched as one of the uniforms went up to the woman in the dress and began to talking softly to her, as they spoke the Policeman gently handed her his headphones and she slipped them over her ears. Her faced softened and she instantly began to look calmer and less confused.

"What are they playing to them?" Malcolm asked intrigued.

"Kenny G, Chris Deburg, Celine Dion that sort of easy listening crap. We've found it re-enforces the status reality and smoothes re-entry. Soon they'll have forgotten this ever happen, except for some bad dreams and odd sexual urges." Dave took out and took another cigarette and lit it, he glanced down at his watch.

It took another half an hour to round up the stragglers and search through the houses, by that time they'd packed Norman back into his van and driven away, Malcom was very glad to be able to take off the hat and glassess, he was even happier about five minutes later when he realised he'd remembered how to say fuck.

"Right, we'll it's all over bar the cleaning up" Dave said

"I saw a pub round the corner as we drove in. I think we both need a pint or six, eh? Besides I've got 20 quid on the 3.30 at Chepstow, a dead cert I reckon." Malcolm stared at Dave and then just shook his head.

"Yeah, I could do with a pint, maybe it'll all start make to make sense after a couple of rounds. You buying?" Malcolm queried.

"Don't make me laugh son, reality maybe thin round here but things haven't broken down that much. Besides it's the privilege of rank" With that he slapped Malcolm on the shoulder and they turned back down the street to find the nearest pub.

We know where you live

2005-05-21T02:01:00.000+13:00

Speaking to a friend of mine she reminded me of something I'd written for her as laugh. Basiclly she was bored temping at some McJob, to help relieve the tedium she asked people she new to tell her what they got up to at the weekend. I'd done nothing particularly intresting so I thought I'd make something up instead....

On Saturday morning I was rudely awoken by a man swinging through my bedroom window, after a brief bout of fisticuffs (I'm not a morning person) I found out he was a Captain Tarquin Musclethawite of a special black-ops division of the TV Licensing Board. Apparently they had need of my special talents (I had no idea what these talents were supposed to be, but as I didn't have anything planned that day I thought I'd play along).

Without so much as a cup of tea I was hoisted up to the radar impenetrable TV Detector Saucer (they've moved on from the detector vans) and flown to an undisclosed location somewhere in London (I could tell you but I'd have to kill you) where we converged on a top secret terrorist hide out. It seems that not only were they planning to release a combined Ebola-anthrax virus onto the unsuspecting population of London but they hadn't paid their TV license for three years (the cads).

Kicking down the door we rushed in guns blazing, after a brief fire fight we realised we were in the wrong street. Apologising to the terrified residents I gave them the number of a good plasterer and we made a hasty retreat.

After Capt. Musclethawite consulted the map again (and someone turned it the right way up) we found the correct house and came in through the windows. The terrorists were all taken by completely by surprise as they were watching CD:UK and put up little resistance.

At this point we noticed the large ticking bomb that took up most of the living room. It was then I found out what my special talents were, I was apparently a retired top bomb disposal expert.

This was of course news to me and I explained this to the Captain. After quickly consulting his map again the Captain realised that he'd actually swung in the wrong window and should have gone next door (I'd always wondered what my neighbour, Brigadier Ian 'no arms, no legs' Mcginty, had done in the army).

Anyway the Captain quickly apologised for his error (it turns out he was colour blind dyslexic with two glass eyes and an old war injury that had left him with absolutley no sense of direction). Apologies over, we were however still left with the small problem of the unexploded bomb. Thinking quickly I traced the power lead to a plug socket behind the sofa and managed to unplug the bomb with seconds to spare.

After we'd all gone home to change our trousers I was invited over to see the queen where we had tea and biscuits and I was awarded a George Cross.

Now that was just Saturday, Sunday was a whole other story but that'll have to wait till another time.

It's all about letting go

2005-05-17T02:41:00.000+13:00

I went to a Yoga Seminar on Saturday, given by a teacher called John Stirk and it's given me quite a few things to think about.

John is my teachers, teacher he's been studying Yoga for over 30 years. He worked for a time with a woman called Vanda Scaravelli (I love that name) and a lot of his Yoga is inspired from her teachings. I say inspired because Vanda was apparently very against the idea of the way she worked becoming a style. In her opinion as soon as something starts to become a style it begins to stagnate, it becomes a set of ridged rules as opposed to a free way of working.

The theme of the seminar was simplicity, going back to basics. One of the things he said that really stuck with me was that all we really had to do in Yoga was 'give up to gravity', the freedom to move in postures comes from this sacrifice and our holding on to ingrained muscle tension is what restricts us both on the mat and off.

Of course the simplest things are often the hardest to achieve. This surrender is not just the letting go of outer tension but moving inwards, focusing your attention like a spotlight and releasing habitual muscle patterns that have become ingrained, like knots in a tree trunk, over many years.

This idea of surrender or sacrifice to something greater is also integral to the philosophy of Yoga. Most of the main yogic texts teach that we have to let go of our ego and sense of 'I' to move past it towards something greater, it's our clinging to a fixed idea or outcome (whether it's a head stand or a higher salary) that brings us pain and suffering. I think that fluidity of mind and body is something that is missing from some yoga today, we are to attached to the end result and not the process of getting there. The focus on physical posture has meant that a persons yoga is measured more on their ability to twist themselves into complex organic origami instead of on what attitude they have to their practice.

The other thing that he said that struck a cord was that body chemistry is indistinguishable from brain chemistry. The same hormones and chemicals that affect the brain also affect the body and vise-versa, a body full of adrenaline is a mind full of adrenaline.

This is one of those simple and obvious statements that we often overlook in everyday life, we often find ourselves saying that the body is tired or the body is stressed but we pay little attention on how that effects the way we think. It's that simple trap of a mind body dichotomy that people always to fall into (myself included), the body is not just a carriage for the mind and the mind is not limited to just the grey play dough contained inside evolutions own crash helmet.

Just a Ying and Yang are really just the two aspects of one thing (the Tai Chi), our body and mind are the same and any subdivision is merely an intellectual construction.

Short fiction on Key23

2005-05-13T05:08:00.000+13:00

I've just posted a short story up on Key23 if you fancy a look

Dancing at the end of the Universe

2005-05-04T23:27:00.000+13:00

I step into the club, dermic sensory web feeling the air around me plugging into the clubs network. A tingling crawls across my skin as the hook-up takes place, HUD display flickers up in front of my eyes giving me the clubs menu, something for all tastes. I scan the different music and reality sets available and tune into a couple of samples.

Dharma Burn bangra dub, clubbers transformed into whirling Hindu deities. Blue skin, many arms and Elephant tusks. Next, Abduction. Sound track switches to deep bass at a cellular level. Dancing grey skinned and silver clad aliens floating by. Bottomless black eyes reflecting me, reflecting you into infinite regress. Flick to Dreamtime. Shamanic rhythm pounding, naked and tattooed swirling round the bonfire of creation.

Suddenly the drumming is drowned out by an irritating jingle, colours bleed and I'm jolted back into the club. I look around confused suddenly noticing that everyone looks the same, almost identical grinning faces turn towards me all wearing the same bright logo emblazoned clothing. Simultaneously they raise cans of Cola to their lips, faces ecstatic like Catholics before the Holy Virgin. I fight a sudden strong desire to join them, to lose my self in their bland acceptance. Viral meme marketing, someone's slipped into the club carrying an infection. I'm annoyed that the bouncers didn't catch them but glad I had the forethought to update my virus definitions before I left tonight. Inoculation kicks in and my perceptions return to normal, I send a mind-mail to the doorman registering a complaint.

Postponing my choice for the moment I move further into the throng, sliding through the writhing mass of people all seemingly merged into one entity, like some cuthulian deity called up in diabolic ritual.

A woman dances across my path ultrasound skinsuit showing off her impressive internal organs. Her partner gyrates next to her, eyes staring into some far off vista, the intelligent algae patterns beneath her skin gently pulsing and changing colour spreading fractal rainbows.

I modify my body chemistry slightly, increasing endorphin levels. As the warm rush fills my veins I briefly toy with the idea of something stronger, then I catch a Mach23 user out of the corner of my eye. A whirling dervish of flaying arms and wild eyes, his metabolism maxed up on hyper-amphetamine. To his time stretched perception everyone else will be moving in bullet-time slow motion, whining drill sound music sounding normal to his ears. Discouraged I decide against it for tonight.

My decision finally made I flip back to the menu, choosing Samadhi I download the set into my nervous system. Senses blossom, conciouness expanding into the digital architecture. Mind linking with everyone on the network, mantra hum of the universe, I am you and you are me, we are all together. Smiling in bliss I dive into the crowd and begin to dance.....

What goes around comes around and around and around

2005-04-13T04:04:00.000+13:00

So I've just got back from Wales where I've spent the last four days half way up a mountain in an isolated farm house training in all things Yoga. We're currently trawling through the Vedanta section of the yogic philosophical cannon and one of the topics we've been covering is Karma and re-incarnation. Some of the others on the course did a set of presentations to the rest of us, this and the subsequent discussions got me thinking.

Re-incarnation is a thread that runs through most Indian philosophical thought and is linked in with the concept of karma. The general concept is that Karma is generated by our actions (both in this life and in our previous lives) and we are bound to this Earth to be born again and again until we reduce that Karma to zero, when that happens the next time we die we either transcend this material plane or we become one with it (depending on which strand of Indian philosophy you believe in).

Karma is generated by all action, not just bad action. Good karma is useful because it negates and reduces bad Karma (which still being on this plane, we are assumed to have a surfeit of) but at the end of the day any action (good or bad) indicates an attachment and so is something that will bind us here.

Now I've always been in two minds regarding the Karma/re-incarnation issue and after giving it some thought and study I've began to notice some seeming inconsistencies and holes.

Firstly there is the obvious and most uncomfortable one, if you are born into a life due to the karma you've carried over from previous your lives, then are those who are born into abusive families, disabled or in some other disadvantaged state somehow deserving of their fate?

This is something I have no truck with personally but the concept of Karma certainly allows for this interpretation.

Another problem with the idea that, essentially, we are all recycled is that it implies that the number of souls available for this process is finite. I've yet to come across a reference where souls are created anew so according to Karmic theory we are all essentially old souls who have under-gone many lifetimes. This becomes a problem however when you consider that the worlds population is increasing, if there are now more people than there were a thousand years ago then where are these new souls coming from?

This leads into my third philosophical conundrum. If the number of souls is finite, then was there then a point when they were all created? If so wouldn't there then have been a time when they had very little or no karmic baggage? So why are there so many of us about now? Surely back in the day people would have been shuffling off the karmic wheel by the dozen?

You could argue that there may have been many more of us then and those of us left now are the real dregs, the right bastards who have been going round in the spiritual washing machine for millennia until we're bleached white. But this doesn't hold up if you go back to point two, the worlds population is increasing, if new souls are coming into being then these new souls would have considerably less karma than the older souls who have been around longer.

My own opinion? Well I have two; the cynical and the spiritual. The cynical is that the idea of Karma and re-incarnation have an obvious use for social and political control. Everyone gets what they deserve from a previous life, so be happy with what you've got and be good so you can hopefully come back higher up the ladder. Those at the bottom have something to hope for and those at the top can feel satisfied that they deserve to be there. Like the Christian concept of Heaven, Karma works on the carrot principle; things will be better after you're dead so don't moan while your here.

Also re-incarnation makes the selling of enlightenment easier, the object of the Indian spiritual traditions (in fact almost all esoteric traditions) is to transcend the illusion of reality and peek below the surface, well how gutted would you be if you didn't quite make it? There you are sitting under your bohdi tree contemplating your navel for years on end, you're just about to glimpse the ultimate when your heart packs up and you shuffle off the mortal coil. You've just completely blown your only chance at enlightenment and wasted all that (non) effort. Not really going to bring in the devotees is it? If however you can come back and try again and again and again until you get it right, well that's like finding the infinite lives cheat on a computer game isn't it?

The spiritual opinion? Well the Vedantic view point, as stated earlier, is that we are all part of the same whole and that our eternal self or Atman is really one with Brahman (the infinite), therefore the concept of a single individual soul is irrelevant because we are all effectively small parts of one higher entity. Enlightenment comes from realising we are not separate from anything else and that we are all one 'I am That'.

While I personally find the inclusive approach of Vedanta appealing and the idea of one ultimate soul or Self does cover some of the problems mentioned above, it still leaves some problems. For instance if we are all part of one greater whole why do we need to keep coming back until we realise it? If there is in reality no individual self, just the illusion of separation, what part of us actually comes back when reincarnated?

At the end of the day it is important to remember that these are the maps and not the territory, all these concepts come from the experience of some vast and numinous 'something' that appears to have been occurring to mystics in all cultures throughout history. The seeds of our religions have grown from various attempts to explain that experience and attempting to work it out intellectually is like reading the car manual without ever having driving the car, it's up to us to walk the path and find it for ourselves not sit around passively waiting for redemption to be handed to us on a plate.

One for all you budding evil geniuses out there

2005-04-06T02:20:00.000+13:00

So you've got your jumpsuited minions, island base and a nice white cat but what uber baddie is complete without a fool-proof plan to destroy the Earth? Well if you're struggling to find a diabolic scheme, fear not, some irresponsible geek has done all the legwork for you: Ways to destroy the Earth.

Right you'll have to excuse me, I'm just off to build a Von Neumann machine.

Cunning Folk

2005-04-02T05:01:00.000+13:00

Went to a talk on cunning folk last night at a bookshop in London called Treadwells, good night very informal. Everyone mingles upstairs and then goes downstairs for the talk after which we came back upstairs for wine and more chat.

The talk itself was very interesting, it was by Owen Davies and was based on his book Cunning Folk which I'm about half way through. It focused on one particular cunning man who was to all intents and purposes a right bastard, basically a huxter and multiple bigamist who was out to fleece the unwary. He got caught up in dealing with a slightly unhinged client who ended up killing his wife because of a misinterpreted astrologically reading, which brought notoriety and eventual imprisonment.

I really enjoyed the talk and I met some interesting and friendly people afterwards, you're made to feel very welcome which is nice, definitely going to go back for some of the other talks they've got lined up in coming weeks.

I've written a more general review of the history of Cunning Folk over at Key23 , so click the link below to read more.

Cunning Folk Article

Nothing new under the sun

2005-03-30T23:40:00.000+13:00

So reading this on technoccult got me thinking.

A 'New' idea is generally going to be a combination of two things, firstly an amalgamation of knowledge already gained (or 'older' ideas) and secondly a novel way of organising or combining this knowledge into something that is greater than the sum of it's parts.

Nothing new is ever created in isolation to previous experience, our knowledge is laid down like sediment then twisted in the heat of our ideas to come out as something seemingly unrecognisable but still formed of it's constituent parts.

What makes an idea new and exciting for the individual is not necessarily the newness of the idea but rather our own previous experience. I still remember the first time I heard Jimi Hendrix play guitar, even though the man died four years before I was born that experience was new and astounding to me. To my Dad however, who was around when Jimi first appeared, he was just Jimi Hendrix.

I suppose there is a point in everyone's lives where things begin to repeat and you begin to see things that seemed new and fresh in your youth come round in a different guise. I think I'm starting to get to that point because I can't help look at supposedly 'hot' new talent like Willy Mason without thinking of all the earnest young singer song writers that have come before him, pouring out their collective hearts over steel strings and singing about how we can all change the world.

Is this though a sign of age or a product of our media saturated world, where old intellectual property is being constantly plundered and repackaged in an attempt for a fast buck? Are we just maxing out on supersize information culture where our minds are expanding like the waistline of a fast food addict?

I suppose though the up side of all this is that the increase in information and experience in our lives provides more fertile ground for our ideas to grow, we have more raw materials to combine in exciting ways, we have enough around that we can demand only the best and not have to survive on what we can cobble together and we look at the best examples and try and surpass them.

aches and pains

2005-03-25T06:25:00.000+13:00

Went down to Sussex on Sunday to train Tai-Chi with some friends, spent several sweaty hours in my mates garage being pounded to a pulp. Most enjoyable, if you like that sort of thing.

picked up some good training tips to work on though. One particularly good one was working striking with one hand while sticking a training pad/glove under the armpit of the other, that way if you move or drop your guarding hand you drop the pad. Good for me as my guard needs work. Another was stepping through at an angle on a kick so that your kick is going through your target as opposed to simply connecting with it. Man that works, when Glenn showed me he almost took my leg off even through a pad.

It was nice to see Glenn and some of the others, everything always seems more chilled once you get down by the sea. It's interesting as well because he makes his living solely from teaching, something I'd like to be doing in a few years time.

When yogis go bad

2005-03-25T01:38:00.000+13:00

This is a great article on the questionable business practices of some yoga gurus, Bikram's always good for a quote:

Because I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me

The best thing about the article is that it's structured around the 5 Yama's of Patanjali's teaching (basically his moral code) demonstrating how none of the people featured in the article are following any of them.

http://www.healingsearch.com/yogis_behaving_badly.htm

This Blog is also worth a read, dedicated to knocking those who seek to place themselves up on pedestals firmly on their arse.

http://guruphiliac.blogspot.com/

towards the light

2005-03-19T01:22:00.000+13:00

I've had a mind machine for years. I bought one years ago when I was feeling flush with cash thinking it would be a short cut into higher states of consciousness, it wasn't and I found all I really got were flashing lights in the eyes, humming sounds in the ears and bugger all else. So I stopped using it, feeling vaguely disappointed and slightly cheated, vowing never again to fall for the sensationalist guff of new age marketing.

A few months ago though I decided that now, having actually taken the time to practice meditation, I'd give it another go so I dusted off the little black box and plugged myself in. The results? Well this is still a work in progress but there's a definite improvement on the last time. Still no alien visitations or jaw dropping vision quests but I've felt a definite improvement in my meditation (either during a session or directly after) , both in the quickness I enter a relaxed and receptive state and the intensity of the experience.

With this new found enthusiasm for my mind machine I thought I'd do a bit more research into how it works and my experiences of it so far (which yes I probably should have done when I bought it originally but hey better late than never) both for my own personal reference and as an excuse for something to write here. So here it is, Mind Machine's for dummy's.

What are they?

In the 1940's a researcher by the name of Gray Walter discovered that if you flash lights at a certain frequency onto a subjects closed eyelids then their brainwaves appear to synch with the frequency of the flashing lights.

Brion Gysin (one of Aldous Huxley's contemporaries) after reading of this research devised a 'Dream Machine which consisted (in true Blue Peter style) of a cardboard tube, with strategic holes cut in it, placed over a light bulb mounted on a turntable. Modern Mind Machines are simply more sophisticated versions of these cut and paste constructions, they use LED's mounted on the back of goggles or glasses which flash lights of varying frequency directly onto the eyelids. Sound is also used in conjunction with the lights in the form of binaural beats to augment the effects on the brain. Binaural beats are sounds at slightly different frequencies played in each ear, when the brain sorts out the information it 'hears' the difference. For instance if one ear hears 440hz and the other 430hz then the brain hears the difference of 10hz (a frequency normally imperceptible to the human ear).

What does it do?

Well according to the theory, the combination of the sound and lights causes the frequency of the brain waves to synch with those of the input, so if the brain is receiving sound and light at 10hz then the brain wave patterns will mimic that frequency.

OK you're probably thinking what good is that? Well there are 4 recognised states of brain activity distinguished from each other by different frequencies of electrical pulses, these are:

Beta or normally waking consciousness characterised by brain activity in the 14 - 30hz range
Alpha is seen as a relaxed but alert state, and has a frequency of 8 - 13hz
Theta is linked to lucid dreaming states and the borderline of sleep with a frequency of 4 - 7hz
Delta is the last and is associated with actually sleep and has a frequency range of 0.5 - 3hz

So in theory by allowing the brain to synch with sounds and lights in these frequencies you can control brain activity and switch between these states at will.

Does it work

Well for me personally, not really at first. I found that I had some feelings of change but I would have to sit for a very long time with lights flashing in my eyes and ufo sounds in my ears before I really noticed anything interesting happening.

However going back again after spending some time learning how to meditate properly I am finding the effects more profound, the reason for this I believe is the quality of my attention.

I have always had what is politely referred to in meditation circles as a 'Monkey mind' a mind that can't sit still on one topic or thought for to long and is generally all over the place trying to think about 5 things at once. The type of meditation I'm practicing the most of at the moment is related to Patanjali Yoga Sutras and consists of the concentration on one object to the exclusion of all others, because of this increase in the ability to concentrate I find the affects of the mind machine become much stronger, especially if I run some chants or drumming through the auxiliary input. I can get into a profound place where I seem to feel the body ceases to exist and there is nothing but the chanting.

Now you could argue that because I'm now meditating regularly the effects I'm getting are from the regular practice and not the machine. I would agree in some respects but I have tried the same meditation on different nights once with the mind machine and once without and there is a difference both in the ease of entering a trance state and the intensity of the experience.

So the moral of this tale? There are no short cuts to experience, if you can afford them then mind machine's are an interesting tool to play with but they're not a quick way to enlightenment and they're no substitute for getting down on your arse and practicing.

reasons to be blogging 1-2-3

2005-03-16T02:21:00.000+13:00

This is I suppose a statement of intent, an explanation, to myself as much as anyone, about why I think it's worth adding my own voice to the thousands and thousands of other textual ranters, shouting on their little digital soapboxes on this worldwide speakers corner.

Because I think I've got something to say. There is an element of narcissism and pretension in all blogs really. I mean why else would anyone want to give strangers a little window into their thoughts? The argument that 'I'm just writing for myself and if anyone else reads it is a bonus' is bollocks really, if you wanted that then what's the point of putting it on the web in the first place?

Because I want to write more. I like writing, I like the space my head goes to when words are just flowing out and I figure that having something like this will make me sit down and write more. If you want to get good at something you've got to do it a lot.

I don't want this to be just an online diary analysing my life in minutia, today I got up and went to the shops and bought some milk etc, I want it as a clearing house for the thoughts that just want to tumble out.

Plus my memory is shit and my organisation nil so it will be good to get things down in a form I can't lose before I forget them.

Because it might make my life more interesting. Not that it isn't already (he says quickly) but the fact of having to find something regular to write about I'm hoping will spur me into finding interesting stuff to do.

Because it's there. Free, easily accessible publishing with a potentially world wide audience. Never in the course of human history have you been able to talk to the whole world about whatever you want (even if it is about what to call your goldfish) you'd be fucking mad not to take advantage of it.

So welcome to my blog, another navel gazer blathering on about his own obsessions. Come back
in a year and find this is still the only post.

Disclaimer: The author is a dyslexic so makes no apologies for any grammatical, spelling or punctuation errors. Just be glad the words are in the right order (most of the time)